Slashdot Mirror
Murdoch-Microsoft Deal In the Works
Hugh Pickens writes "The Financial Times reports that Microsoft is in discussions to pay Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, owner of newspapers ranging from the Wall Street Journal of the US to The Sun of the UK, to 'de-index' its news websites from Google, setting the scene for a search engine battle that could offer a ray of light to the newspaper industry. Microsoft is desperate to catch Google in search, and, after five years and hundreds of millions of dollars of losses, Bing, launched in June, marks its most ambitious attempt yet. Microsoft's interest is being interpreted as a direct assault on Google because it puts pressure on the search engine to start paying for content. 'This is all about Microsoft hurting Google's margins,' said the web publisher who is familiar with the plan. 'It's easy to believe that [Microsoft] may spew senseless riches into publishers' pockets, radically distorting the news market, just to spite Google,' writes Rob Beschizza at BoingBoing. 'Murdoch could be wringing cash out of a market he knows is doomed to implosion or assimilation. And he doesn't even have to be an evil genius, either; he just has to be smarter than Steve Ballmer.'"
The children are right to mock you AC. Google honors robots.txt, if a news outlet doesn't want their site indexed, all they need to do is put a deny rule in it.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I remember reading that what Rupert Murdoch actually wants is headlines to be trawled as currently done, but for actual news items to be paid for. He wants Google to check the story for relevance but not display it; Just a link to the place where you pay for / subscribe to the article.
Needless to say, Google said "It doesn't work like that."
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
No, I'm pretty sure that with expert sex change (I'm going to call it that because it seems to have little to do with experts exchanging info unless your definition of "experts" is "non-experts" and your definition of "exchange" is "lock up behind a paywall"), you have to view source, THEN scroll down.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
The assumption that Murdoch doesn't understand robots.txt is untenable. When this issue has come up for discussion here on /. in the past, someone always reproduces a robots.txt file from one of the Fox sites, and that file demonstrates a full understanding of robots.txt, including setting up indexing maps for the Googlebot.
Google should do exactly what it's doing, and honour robots.txt without comment, and let MS and News Corp shoot themselves in the foot (or succeed wildly, if that's what's going to happen, but I doubt it). To unilaterally stop linking to News Corp would probably result in even more scrutiny from the DoJ.
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
He does put a robots.txt file in his sites. See for example
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/robots.txt
http://www.thesun.co.uk/robots.txt
He's put loads of crawlers on it. Googlebot isn't one of them, because he presumably is happy for it to visit.
In Britain, The Sun and News of the World are about as trashy as it gets, although there is the Daily Star and the Daily Sport if that's too upmarket for you. The Times however is a pretty decent paper, although there is the Telegraph, Independent and Guardian if he starts charging for it. It is not as good as the Financial Times which already has a successful pay model in place.
ANd people were willing to pay for sky news even when BBC was free.
Sky News is free. You can get it on Freeview, and it's (well used to be, I haven't checked recently) unscrambled via satellite.
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
Hey Microsoft, how much are you paying Murdoch to stop me from finding his sites on google? I'll undercut him! For a mere $2/mo, I promise never to follow a google link to a Murdoch site again! Let me know soon.
he already uses a robots.txt file,
User-agent: * /printer_friendly_story /projects/livestream
Disallow:
Disallow:
#
Sitemap: http://www.foxnews.com/google_news_news.xml
Sitemap: http://www.foxnews.com/google_news_entertainment.xml
Sitemap: http://www.foxnews.com/google_news_opinion.xml
Sitemap: http://www.foxnews.com/google_news_politics.xml
Sitemap: http://www.foxnews.com/google_search_news.xml
Sitemap: http://www.foxnews.com/google_search_entertainment.xml
Sitemap: http://www.foxnews.com/google_search_opinion.xml
Sitemap: http://www.foxnews.com/google_search_politics.xml
Sitemap: http://www.foxnews.com/google_search_sections.xml
That's what robots.txt is for - Google really don't care if you want to use them or not, but they respect anyone who wants to opt out using an industry standard. Good luck being the person to explain to your boss why 83% of your market can't even see you online any more, though. It's like "opting-out" of advertising for free on 83% of all billboards in the city you're advertising in... nobody's stopping you, and nobody can blame the biggest billboard company in the world if you can't get enough people interested in your product when you only advertise on the other 17%.
My ass. If I have one of those maps covered in local businesses and I take yours off, you can't sue me. Google would laugh them out of court.
If Google were to stop dealing with the web entirely and start making buttscratchers, could people sue for (literally) the trillions of dollars it would cost them? I don't think so. Google has no obligation to them, or anybody but its shareholders (of which its founders are IIRC a majority).
You might not be joking - News Corp might very well sue - but the suit would absolutely fail.
That's completely disregarding that Google would only be complying with Murdoch's stated wishes.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Which is very telling, as half of the Daily Show and the Colbert Report is making fun of Fox News.
In fact, the DS broke the story about Fox re-using the footage of the "tea parties" for the anti-gay "protest" a few weeks ago - forcing Fox to issue a formal retraction.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Google considers it cheating for a site to show different content to regular users than they show to GoogleBot. If you encounter a site that does so, you should report it to Google via their web spam report form.
I used to report Expert Sexchange, it's probably because of people like me that Google forced them to put the actual content on the page.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Ok, now go read the history of *any* tribal society. You'll invariably find they either raided, murdered and raped and were glorified by history, or were raided, murdered and raped - and surviving histories paint them as savages.
The more effective the murdering rapist, the bigger his cult of personality. Whatever society evolves from this primitive state is guaranteed to show undue deference to their forebears. Ask a Italian what they think of Cesar, a Macedonian what they think of Alexander, a Frank what they think of Charlemagne, a Swede what they think about Eric the Red, a Jew what they think of Joshua, a Mongol what they think of Genghis Khan etc. etc. etc.
It's as much time for the Muslims to take responsibility for their (father's) actions as it is all of humanity. By your standards, not only have we all blood on our hands, we glorify it.
Ready for a shocker? It continues TODAY. There isn't an active army in the field who hasn't killed and raped it's opponents. Usually not to the same scale as in history, but not always - notice in those exceptions, it was Muslims who were raped and murdered.