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Newspapers Reconsidering Google News
News.com ran an article earlier in the week talking about the somewhat strained relationship between newspapers and Google. Google's stance is firm: 'We don't pay to index news content.' Just the same, newspapers with an online presence are starting to reconsider their relationship with Google, the value of linking, and the realities of internet economics. Talk of paying for content, as well as ongoing court cases, has observers considering both sides of the issue: "While some in newspaper circles point to the Belgium court ruling and the content deals with AP and AFP as a sign Google may be willing to pay for content, Google fans and bloggers interpreted the news quite differently. To them, it was obvious that the Belgium group had agreed to settle--even after winning its court case--because they discovered that they needed Google's traffic more than the fees that could be generated from news snippets. Observers note that with newspapers receiving about 25 percent of their traffic from search engines, losing Google's traffic had to sting."
Kinda makes you wonder about the "journalism is hard" comment in the article.
In my experience as a journalist (a while back) its amazing to find out how much newspapers rely on PR wire services and direct contact with spokespeople. There is one paradigm shift that can impact newspapers massively in this regard. Blogs that cover news (and blog owners that are finding alternative uses for their on line properties) get ever more dominant.
Google has done no evil, where MS has been nothing but.
Hm, what a black-white stance. Oh wait, I get it, it's because of the slogan, right?
Heh. Kids. When will you grow up.
Google is so huge right now, you'll find people with all sorts of agenda inside. And the funny things is, many of them, at all levels, worked at Microsoft at some point. Some of them worked in Apple. Some of the people in Apple worked in Google. Some of the people in Microsoft worked in Apple or Google.
A corporation has no face. But, if it makes you feel better, you can keep putting faces on it. It makes it all so much simpler...
This actually offers an interesting question: Can you dare to sue google if you depend on page visits? Can you actually survive it when Google decides to "zero" you, to make you nonexistant in their searches?
This is the reason why I do believe it'll be nice to see Yahoo and Microsoft work (or merge?) together better, so they can compete better against Google.
I do use Google today, it has the best search results, undeniably. But it also has a huge market share, which makes content producers very nervous, for a good reason.
Google may delist you overnight, after an algorithm tweak, for something completely innocent, and not SEO related at all, that you did on your site. It's unavoidable, even if Google was run by shiny white angels with halo above their heads, an algorithm for a search engine isn't an exact science, and so anybody in any moment can end up as an edge case that Google doesn't handle properly.
If we have 2-3 major search engines with equal market share, we gain the following benefits:
1. Spammers will have hard time scamming all engines at once, as they use wildly different backend processing, and as a result receive less traffic (i.e. if half the traffic comes from Live, and half from Google, cheating one of them gets you half the possible traffic, not all of it).
2. If you happen to be an edge case on either search engine after an algorithm tweak, it's much less likely both engines did the same tweak at the same time, so while your traffic will decrease, the other search engines on the market will still provide enough traffic for you until this is sorted.
3. When either search engine does something inappropriate, or questionable (ok, for the simple folk out there: "evil"), people will have easier time going to court to defend their rights, because if the search engine provider becomes abusive and threatens blacklisting, that'll have much smaller effect if the engine isn't a monopolist (in this case they'll mostly hurt themselves).
4. Innovation, innovation, innovation. Just imagine the kind of innovation we'll see from both Yahoo/Microsoft and Google if they had equal market share. Microsoft would have much bigger revenue and thus much bigger incentive to support their position on the market. Google, likewise.
I mean, what's the best we saw of Google as of late? A week ago they changed the layout of their home page which made it JavaScript dependent and harder to work with. That's not innovation, that's regression. As for the rest of their new offerings, they mostly come from companies they bought recently.
Yahoo's holding on to their "portal" strategy since this is where the most of their income comes from so their search acceptable but certainly not good enough or innovative. They can't risk spending too much money on search R&D alone.
As for Microsoft Live, they're apparently trying to come up with interesting interfaces for search, but they are quite young on that one market, their search results aren't really good, and need the experience of Yahoo to give them a boost and incentive to spend more research in the area.
So, bottom line: monopoly is never good, even when it's supposedly "not evil".