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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'll give the top 1000 folks on slashdot who eat bread a nickel never to eat it again.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
What TFA is short on is any sense of motivation on Mark Cuban's part. Why does he want to do this? Did Google frighten him when he was a baby?
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
Does the dude have stock at Microsoft? Or what's it to him?
The phrase tortious interference comes to mind (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference)
This won't affect me. I don't search for advertisers. In fact, getting rid of the paid cruft will make searching for true results even better. Besides, a billion dollars is starting to fade into the noise of google's net worth. It may hurt Google, but it won't kill Google.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
If what Cuban is suggesting is brought up in the courts as bribery I should be legally allowed to sue our legislature and executive branch any time the put an earmark in the Federal budget. The backlash from basically eliminating kick backs would bring down a lot of kings of the mountain, IMHO, not a moment too soon.
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Really? Spending one BILLION/MILLIARD dollars for what is essentially an advertising campaign? Sounds pretty risky to me. If you have that kind of money to gamble with, why not spend that money on actually building a better search engine?
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
So you (a typical user) go looking for something, and the "top 1000 sites" don't happen to turn up in your searches. Of course somebody still highly relevant will still turn up, so you end up finding what you want.
What did you lose? Nothing. Well, nothing except for a web page where the publisher took money in exchange for not being found -- in other words, a page you couldn't trust anyway.
Do you care? Somehow, I think not.
I don't see how this kind of move "kills" Google. The only one it "kills" is the billion dollar ($1M x 1000) giver. They're paying a billion dollars to the top 1000 sites in order to improve sites 1001-2000 search rankings. Cuban loses and sites 1-2000 win to varying degrees adding up to $1B total.
$1M isn't peanuts to everybody. The regular public can't see Google's site rankings, but assuming they're similar to the Alexa rankings, there are some sites that would probably jump at a million dollars. The porn sites, a lot of the bloggers, and some of the shakier social networking sites would probably take the money and run.
But there's something else odd about that list. Many of the top-ranked sites -- 3 of the first 20, for example -- are Microsoft. Again, that's not Google's ranking page, but MS sites are still findable via Google. If MS plans to 'kill' Google, shouldn't they start by taking their own sites off that search engine first?
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They are surely a top-1000 site. Will they get the cash to de-list themselves?
If the barber shaves all those who does not shave themselves, who shaves the barber?
Oh, really? You think the /. corporate overlords (for example) wouldn't take a good, hard look at this offer and try to play Google against msft? Hell, I would. Especially given the /. techie user base which 1) knows how to block ads and 2) knows how to find a site w/o first typing it into Google.
Though the two criteria above certainly don't fit many websites out there, I still believe websites as businesses wouldn't mind at all playing Google against msft. In fact, one could make a very good argument that Google receives a disproportiate amount of revenue from the websites they point to. The market will decide this question. And though I think this type of Internet partitioning has the potential to pull the Internet apart I still have to admit it's an interesting idea.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
I wonder if they will give themselves $1 million to take their own team off Google.
/me SLAPS Mark Cuban with a giant trout!
Wow! Look who the first result is for!?!? Mark Cuban's teams website! Shame Shame!!
http://tinyurl.com/yefvopu
Maybe it's not a bad idea after all, if he can get every website off google except his own, then then no matter what you search for, Google will only return the Mavs website as a result!!
I always said you'd have to pay me to use Bing. How about bribing 1 million heavy users with $1000 to switch and evangalize about it? That's one epic astroturf right there.
Nice to know our richest people fail at finding uses for their spare cash that actually benefit the human civilization.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
You take the million, fine ... but what about next year? Do you get another million, or was this a one-shot deal, in which case a million is nowhere near enough to permanently remove a top-1000 site.
Plus, what's to stop them from making another site with a similar name, and making the bing link redirect to the new site? New site is now at the top of both, with an extra $1m in their pocket.
Addendum: this seems to be a localisation issue. When searching from Germany, bing searches in something like "international mode", which seems to increase the weight for forums. Anyways, since I was logged in on google, the results were influenced by my settings and maybe even my web history. I retract my criticism of bing I made in the parent posting.
I believe the comparison was with the EU.
FWIW, I was very surprised coming here how corrupt US politics are, to the point most people don't even notice. People like Joe Lieberman get called "the honest man of politics" because they put their contributors ahead of their party, as if being in line with the views of your party (and thus the shorthand many people used to judge your views and values when they elected you) is somehow wrong, but doing what your campaign contributors demand is somehow honest.
In Britain, when people like Jonathan Aitken and the Hamiltons were found to be "for sale" in much the same way as US politicians are, they were shunned. I'm amazed the birthplace of modern democracy doesn't take corruption more seriously.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Dunno about the US, but in the EU and especially Germany, there are lot of provisions. Not being allowed to sell under your own buying/production price, not being allowed to cross-finance one product with another, not being allowed to tie in some kinds of sales, etc etc etc.
As I said IANAL, but this leaves a strange taste at best.
Someone needs to write a firefox extension to auto-add that little gem to the end of them all.
They could call it the noob-retainer!
I use Bing all the time! I bing for google, then key in what I want.
But seriously, when I move around computers I use what's available and convenient. Most of the time Bing gets me nowhere, then I shake my head and google it. Google might get me nowhere as well, but somehow it's more authoritative to me - if Google can't find what I'm looking for, nobody can.
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Not only is it a thought experiment, it is waaaaaaaaaaay old f'ing news: I made a submission on it over a year ago and it's only getting play on /. now? Oh yeah, this is /. ...
TFA makes it pretty clear that this (on his personal blog) is a thought experiment, not an actual plan he has any intention to follow through. More, he is speculating about moves that Microsoft or others might take to bring Google down and what that would do to the market.
Frankly, it as much use as mine our your random musings on business: the only motivation for it making the Slashdot front page seems to be that this guy coincidentally happens to have a billion dollars.
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