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Mark Cuban's Plan To Kill Google
rsmiller510 writes "Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, has a plan to kill Google by paying the top 1,000 sites a cool million each to leave the Google index and move to Microsoft. But could such a plan ever work, and would it be worth the risk to abandon Google?"
I know bribery is accepted practice in the US but here in the EU it is still frowned upon.
-- Cheers!
Is it worth $1 million to leave Google? I'm guessing most of the sites would say no, that's incredibly short sighted.
They are surely a top-1000 site. Will they get the cash to de-list themselves?
P.S. The guy is an idiot. People go to Google not to get stuff from a top-1000 site, but to find stuff that is not found in the search bars of the top-1000 sites.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
The top 1000 clients of google likely piss away a million $ a day in coffee alone.
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
1 million is peanuts. Amazon, one of the top 100 sites, makes that during a coffee break.
Why opt out of free product placement (Amazon usually ranks high in google) worldwide, for a pittance?
Cuban's mojo has left the room.
Even if the "top 1000" sites accepted the bribe, that wouldn't make much of a dent. How small does this pilgrim think the internet is?
And what's to stop Google from re-indexing them?
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
For the top 1000, a million bucks is not a lot of money. Why risk alienating the population for what is to them a drop in the bucket?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Exactly. What's $1M to Facebook compared to the benefits of Google's hits?
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
...and I think the top 1,000 sites would easily calculate that their losses in ad revenue and web traffic would be worth more than $1,000,000.
This is simple, complete rubbish, spoken by a fool. One million dollars would be nowhere near enough for any profitable site to take itself off the world's biggest search engine, effectively killing future growth.
Also, assuming these sites aren't in competition with google directly, and most websites aren't, why would they care about trying to knock down Google, for a trivial sum?
That's it, today is the day I give up on slashdot. Bye.
Wow what a testament to Google. Mark Cuban is basically saying that nobody has a product that could even hope of competing with Google and the only way to conceivably take them down is to bribe their clients with gobs of money.
So, is he offering this out of his own pocket? (a billion dollars).
Or is this just a hare-brained idea that he is tossing out there to get some spin on his own name.
Let's see the Dallas Mavericks remove themselves from anything Google first. Oh, that's right, he must have already, never heard of the team before...
Tisha Hayes
Perhaps they could develop something better than Google, and attract customers that way. Just a thought.
From wikipedia: "In 1982, Cuban moved to Dallas, Texas. Cuban first found work as a bartender,[13][14] then as a salesperson for Your Business Software, one of the first PC software retailers in Dallas. He was terminated less than a year later, after meeting with a client to procure new business instead of opening the store.
Cuban started a company, MicroSolutions, with support from his previous customers from Your Business Software. MicroSolutions was initially a system integrator and software reseller. The company was an early proponent of technologies such as Carbon Copy, Lotus Notes, and CompuServe.[15] One of the company's largest clients was Perot Systems.[16] In 1990, Cuban sold MicroSolutions to CompuServe--then a subsidiary of H&R Block--for $6 million.[17] He retained approximately $2 million after taxes on the deal.[18]
In 1995, Cuban and fellow Indiana University alumnus Todd Wagner started Audionet, combining their mutual interest in college basketball and webcasting. With a single server and ISDN line[19], Audionet became Broadcast.com in 1998. By 1999, Broadcast.com had grown to 330 employees and $13.5 million in revenue for the second quarter.[20] In 1999, during the Dot-com boom, Broadcast.com was acquired by Yahoo! for $5.9 billion in Yahoo! stock.[21]"
This man is not a business genius. He is a good self-promoter, and has leveraged this to making a lot of money. Re-read the last couple sentences. he had a business with 13.5 million in revenue in 3 months (not profit... with 330 employees, it was much, much lower). He then sold it for likely a 500+ P/E ratio.
The tech stock market bubble made this man. I don't disparage him for that. However, any business advice coming from this man is virtually worthless. Self-promotion... he's up there.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Yeah these numbers just don't add up. First off, I'm going to assume that this is a million dollars a year (or somesuch), otherwise it's ridiculous on the face of it. No high-profile web company is going to sign a perpetual contract like that. Now, the top 1,000 sites depend on internet traffic. No doubt their advertising budgets are more than a million dollars. Telling them that they can get one million dollars if they give up a huge chunk of their internet visibility is ridiculous. It's worth much more than that to them.
Conversely, this whole plan would cost 1 billion dollars to pull off. Sure, Microsoft could afford that, and would pay that much to destroy Google. But this is a poor plan. If Google no longer listed the top 1,000 sites (which is a big if, since many of those sites have no particular love of Microsoft...), then would Google crash and burn? Or would the sites currently ranked 1,0001-2000 suddenly see a huge upsurge in their traffic and profitability?
Lastly, how would this work on a technical level? Sure, you can configure your server to reject all requests from googlebot, preventing them from indexing sub-pages, but you can't technically (or legally) prevent Google from returning a link to "wsj.com" when someone searches for "Wall Street Journal". So any "de-indexing" wouldn't be complete.
This "plan" fails on so many levels. I'm sure Google is not too concerned about this. Any companies that participated would be signing their own death sentence: their web visibility would drop, public opinion of the company would drop, they might open themselves to legal attacks... and all for a "cool million".
... but if he's going to just throw a billion dollars away, why doesn't he do something decent with it like feed the poor or cure a disease or give computers to schools or fund music programs?
Or start a new business to help America get its shit together and beat this recession?
Thousand and million have always been the same in the US and UK, and the British billion has just about died about in the UK, sadly -- 'billion' means 'thousand million' to us these days, just like it does for you.
It's a pity, as I did like the name 'milliard' for a thousand million (a billion used to be a million million), but I suppose the gain in consistency is worth it.
How about you start using metric measurements in return? :)
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
It's Microsoft, they can have $58 Billion + $15 Billion and they still won't be able to make any good products. Microsoft management still believes that 9 women can make a baby in a month, all you have to do is spend a few millions in advertising afterwards to make everybody believe the fetus is a full-grown baby.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
thanks for correcting your previous post, but not only does Microsoft have lots more cash than Google ($37.5B) but it is generated primarily through its Windows operating system/application sales.
If there is a battle over the search market and Google starts losing significant market share, its revenues are under direct threat. Microsoft's revenues are not. Basically you are cutting off Google's supply lines (to use a war analogy). So as the fight goes on Google will get weaker.
Of course, this is the long-term strategy that Google has been working on against Microsoft with (free) web based applications and now the Google Chrome operating system. But people are very reluctant to change OS's and applications whereas they are likely to quickly shift to another search engine.
Looking at Mark Cuban's robots.txt file ( http://blogmaverick.com/robots.txt ), I see that he's not blocking Googlebot. Therefore, he is listed in Google's index. So why should someone take $1 million from him to leave the Google index when he clearly does not want to leave Google's index himself?
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Wow, this idea is almost as brilliant as bing. Why do people want to punish success? And why help m$? Google may dominate search, but m$ is still bigger, richer, & more powerful, right? Or not?
Let's just look at the top 50 sites to get an idea of the feasibility of this plan, as reported by Alexa.
First, we filter out all of the Google properties. By my count, that leaves 30.
Next, filter out Microsoft's properties, as the scheme would put theme in the antitrust crosshairs: That leaves 26.
Forget Yahoo; they make a lot more than $1MM annually from Google. We're down to 22.
What's left? Forget LinkedIn -- search results are their bread-and-butter. Likewise the IMDb, Craigslist, Twitter, eBay and Myspace. Wikipedia and the BBC would consider it a breach of their charters. Facebook might be tempted, but their users would protest too much. Only 13 out of 50 remain. Of these, which would play ball? RapidShare would -- they're rather be ignored by search traffic. The Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Turkish social networking sites might. Likewise the porn sites. In truth though, we have only five or six "maybes" in the top 50.
Bottom line, it's an absurd notion -- more old media fantasies of crippling the internet with blunt 19th century methods. I'm not saying that Google is unassailable, but a challenge by a competitor who hasn't put in the sweat-equity is a guaranteed to failure.
Google can just pay them a $million each to come back. Or $1.5 million. Google's a lot richer than Mark Cuban is.
--
make install -not war
The "Top 1000" sites are the ones I don't bother searching for: google, microsoft, yahoo, salon, nytimes, espn, amazon: I already know what they are. You use a search engine to search for stuff you can't find.
I was just reading about Order of Succession. Lacking a papal bull to assert otherwise, this post is the legitimate heir to the bastard son of an anonymous coward, who had a notion but failed to make an assertion. I would have liked social studies a lot more if we had done a comparative survey of succession methods (such as Tanistry) with the British Isles providing the case studies in strife and dysfunction. "For today's lesson in the optics of legitimate conception, we turn again to the British Isles."
From what I can see, tortious interference doesn't kick in until there is breach of contract. Nor am I aware of anything in law against forming market partnerships short of exploiting monopoly powers.
This whole thread, people seem not to get the point: if content is king, there's no reason why the owners of content shouldn't engage in a coordination game to protect their collective interests. It's not obvious that the search engine middle people should have gained the dominant economic hand.
The key phrase here being "if content is king". The content owners would like to think so, but the internet says otherwise: there is a heck of a lot of base load in pornography, drugs, and Asian merchandise. The government can bulk relocate the top 1000 street corner drug dealers in LA to the Chino human storage facility and it would dent the drug supply for weeks, or maybe even days or hours. There is also the long tail, user created content not yet aggregated at a major social networking site, and the content formerly known as knowledge.
Against this you have the cultural lock-in of impressionable young adults, and baby boomers who haven't yet figured out that if Elvis is still alive, he's probably fatter than Marlin Brando and creepier than Howard Hughs (who disappeared from sight for a good while himself).
There is also highly precarious tier of mass-market content manufactured against the better post-evolutionary judgement of its customer base. The macro breweries became successful, in part, because they managed to make the taste of a good beer a dim memory. Similarly, news products are continually debased, and rely more on customer momentum than choice opportunities.
It's extremely dangerous for a mass-market success story which has invested billions of dollars lulling their primary market to sleep on quality issues to introduce a choice event into the marketplace. It could be that some people discover that Google without many of the current top 1000 sites actually returns more interesting search results, as an acquired taste, given a fifteen minute taste test. Who knew?
There are more precarious market gorillas out there than people think. Cigarettes make women ugly at a younger age. Natural Coke and Pepsi make you obese. The holy trinity of corn/soy/sodium are an express train to the afterlife. Sports are the life obsession of the politically disenfranchised (for myself, hockey scores improve my minutes, while destroying my hours and days). The tripe on most news services actively sabotages attention span and issue comprehension. Duff Beer does not make you sexy. The seven never-fail sex tips of an airbrushed super model is not going to save your marriage (if the male sexual response proved too subtle to master in private study).
You can't just randomly yank the chain on these captive markets without risk of waking your customers up. There was a story here a few days ago about intelligence: many people have it, few use it. Requires effort. It's less effort to delegate to the lower brain functions, as shaped by evolutionary psychology that outlived its crown. Mmmm beer. Mmmm donuts. Mmmm bacon.
What gives the marketers an orgasm is the old joke "Whenever I feel like exercise, I lie down until the feeling passes." This is the reflex they relentle
You are so right...
Mark Cuban is an idiot, and the only reason he has money is that he managed to find an even bigger idiot at Yahoo to approve the acquisition of broadcast.com. Though I guess you have to give him some credit for that...