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?"

Comments

Bribery

[tsa]

I know bribery is accepted practice in the US but here in the EU it is still frowned upon.

Re:Bribery

[mordors9]

I would be willing to happily accept $1M in cash to never use Google again. It may be a bribe but I would be willing to suffer your scorn.

Re:Bribery

[Pieroxy]

What the heck is that all about? Google generates much much more than a million dollars to the top 1000 e-commerce websites, and in a few days. This has to be a joke.

Seriously, the USERS decide which search engine is best, not the website owners. And why in the world would the top 1000 sites listen to an anonymous rich fool instead of Google which has provided a decent flow of clicks to their websites for ages....

Are we the 1st of April or anything?

Re:Bribery

[Patch86]

Ask Intel how that attitude worked out for them in Europe. They could give you about 1.06 billion reasons as to why this is not a smart plan.

Re:Bribery

[binarylarry]

Or 9.39 billion reasons why it is:

http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20091013/intel-profit-sales-beat-street/

Re:Bribery

[bhagwad]

If you're one of the top 1000 sites, you don't need the 1 Mill that bad in return for a poor rep.

Re:Bribery

[poetmatt]

Mark Cuban has a love affair with microsoft and so this is just another part of his love affair. Basically, that's all it is. Bing won't dominate because it's quality is crap, and buying out a lot of customers won't make up for the fact that there will be a: less profitability and b: less quality.

Re:Bribery

[quickOnTheUptake]

Is anyone going to point out that this isn't bribery in any meaningful sense of the word?
Paying someone to act a particular way is not a bribe, unless the guy being bribed has some moral or legal obligation to act contrary to the briber's interest.
So do these websites have a moral or legal obligation to support or cooperate with Google?
Oh yeah, and you're trolling.

Re:Bribery

[PopeRatzo]

This is just Mark Cuban's way of getting his name in the papers. I can't imagine that any big company would be willing to try to remove their name from Google's search results. I just don't see how Cuban's plan is going to work. If it could hurt Google, Microsoft would have removed their sites from Google's index long ago.

Apparently, money is not an indication of sense.

Re:Bribery

[interploy]

Doesn't matter. Google's name has already achieved the marketer's dream: a generic name/verb. Which means it's in the same league as Coke, Kleenex and Xerox. Their name has become so big and so common it's replaced the real term. No one get's a soda, they get a coke, even when that 'coke' is a Pepsi. When was the last time anyone asked for a tissue instead of a Kleenex? And when you want something copied, you 'xerox' it. No one I know under the age of 40 searches for anything one the web, they 'google' it.

So it doesn't matter what this guy pays, Google is simply too big to be replaced at this stage in the game. If Microsoft is smart, they'll work to make Bing number 2. If not, instead of becoming the search engine equivalent of Pepsi, they'll become the next Royal Crown Cola.

Re:Bribery

[tuxgeek]

There is a gotcha in this plan
Remove the top 1000 sites from Google, and another top 1000 will replace them.

Personally, I will never use anything affiliated with M$. My bias does them no harm, but I just feel better for it.

Bing is just another crazy idea to compete in a marker place they will never devote themselves to 100%. M$ has a long history of making gutted applications and giving away for free merely to steal market share from producers of quality products.

Although I have not, and will never use bing, it might be okay for some, but not in my world. Sites taking the bait, dumping Google and switching to M$ will just remove themselves from 50%+ of internet searches. Another stupid idea takes shape ...

Re:Bribery

[FatdogHaiku]

Right. The fine is just a legal way to give the EU a butt load of money because Intel made nine butt loads of money... So the EU can say "See, we didn't take the evil profit mongers bribe, we punished them by accepting a check for a butt load of money!"

The only thing that has me guessing is whether we are talking about metric butt loads or imperial butt loads.

Re:Bribery

[damburger]

True. The plan takes zero account of the strength of the Google brand; if companies did desert them then people wouldn't stop finding companies in Google overnight. They would simply find other (suddenly very happy) companies.

Re:Bribery

[__aasqbs9791]

And a million dollars might be a bunch to you and me, but for some of these companies it isn't going to cover the lost sales for even a short period of time that people find their competitors. And I'm not sure how Mark expects to make any of that money back. Damn, I wish I had a billion to just throw away.

Re:Bribery

[Jesus_666]

"I'll pay you a million dollars if you remove yourself from the most important search engine in the internet, thus losing much more than that" somehow doesn't quite seem like a compelling offer. The implied "the revenues you lose will flow to your competitors" doesn't make it more attractive, either.

Re:Bribery

[severoon]

I'm in SF. All $1M would mean to me is a downpayment on a very reasonable but well-located house. And I'd have to use Google to research the neighborhoods I'd consider moving into.

And I'm just a dude. We're talking about companies here. I work for a relatively small software lab, and $1M is less than 1 month's payroll, bennies, and taxes.

Re:Bribery

[Imrik]

The difference in my opinion is that people often use kleenex and xerox to refer to using items of another brand, I have yet to hear anyone use google to mean searching for something without using Google.

Re:Bribery

[Idbar]

As long as Mark pays Experts-exchange.com and they agree to leave my Google results alone once and for all, I'll be happy.

Re:Bribery

[pwfffff]

I've actually solved several computer issues via that site's google results. You do know that you can just scroll all the way down to see the answers, right?

I just might even give them my money some day. Maybe.

So, the question is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it worth $1 million to leave Google? I'm guessing most of the sites would say no, that's incredibly short sighted.

Re:So, the question is...

[shawn(at)fsu]

Yeah if you're one of the top sites on Google a million probably doesn't mean nearly as much as Mark Cuban thinks it does.

What about Google?

[MMC Monster]

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.

1 million is peanuts

[guyfawkes-11-5]

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.

Re:wow, a whole million?

[dontmakemethink]

Exactly. What's $1M to Facebook compared to the benefits of Google's hits?

Go Google

[DiademBedfordshire]

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.

Other People's Money

[Tisha_AH]

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...

Mark's Resume

[MyLongNickName]

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.

Re:wow, a whole million?

[JustinOpinion]

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".

Not to be a communist here...

[Arcaeris]

... 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?

You first, Mark

[Jason Levine]

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?