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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.'"
Fox wants to pull out of the news business? And we're supposed to complain?
I don't thinks this means what he thinks it means.
John
I don't personally see any down side of having all of Murdoch's content removed from my searches. If I want news, I want the real deal, not the Faux News spin on it.
Also I can't imagine two entities that deserve each other more, it's a marriage made in hell.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
Most News Corp. content is generally complete shit, to put it nicely.
We're probably all better off if Google doesn't index it. It'll leave the rest of our results less cluttered with turds.
What you're overlooking is that in the past, Microsoft has had very little regard for fairness in business or for their customers.
I agree that Google's click tracking is annoying, and they certainly are datawhores... but so far I haven't seen any evidence that they're using this data irresponsibly.
So far, I trust Google with my data over Microsoft... and they'll have to work really hard to overcome that stigma
Capitalism only works when everyone plays by the rules -- Monopolies break the rules
If I were google, I would let MS have News Corp. The average internet user is not going to even know about the missing content to drive them to switch to bing, and the savvy users could not give a shit about News Corp and MS.
Now if the big news sites suddenly drop from Google but can be found via Bing, people are going to change there.
The interesting question is: Are people going to change search engine - or news site?
Since most news sites these days essentially publish press releases and agency reports verbatim, there isn't much difference between them anyways. I'm pretty sure a lot of people wouldn't even notice. My vote is that they'll stay with the search engine and just read the same news story at a different news site.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I think you've made an error here:
But truth is, it's a lot easier to find the news you're looking for from search engine. If you spot theres a news site you think is good quality, then you go to it. Now if the big news sites suddenly drop from Google but can be found via Bing, people are going to change there.
Current search engine users are almost exclusively Google users. If people almost exclusively get their news by searching, they have no site loyalty and almost exclusively get their news from whatever sites Google sends them, and therefore when the news sites drop off Google, they will stop visiting those sites. The people who visit the news sites directly or by syndication will not even notice the transition.
Only the subset of users who are loyal to a news site, and only reach it via Google searches, and who figure out why they can't find it on Google any more, will switch to Bing.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
He can't legally win in the US against bloggers who use fair use excerpts of his companies' stories. There is too much precedent there. As long as bloggers comply with the law, he's screwed. The only ones he can nab are the ones who excerpt half of a story, provide one or two sentences of commentary and that's it. What this means is that his stories won't be indexed in Google, but the bloggers who link to them will be indexed. So really, it's a two-fer against Murdoch. If he were smart, what he'd be doing is putting EVERYTHING they've done online since the founding of his companies, and be encouraging everyone to link to their work, talk about it, excerpt it, etc. so that News Corp would become the most powerful news source in Google's index.
I can't but help to think that this is illegal behavior somehow. I also can't help but think that this proposed move has already been cleared by Microsoft's legal department.
In my mind, there is "competition" and there is the game of "dirty tricks." In competition, competitors simply do the best they can and operate under the idea of "may the best man win." In the game of dirty tricks, competitors do their best to slow, stop or even kill the competition. I can't say for sure which color hat Google is wearing presently, but Microsoft most definitely subscribes to latter behavior rather than the former.
No one is going to switch search tools because some particular newspaper is in Bing's index and not Google's. If Bing wants to get the traffic, all they have to do is return better results. Buying exclusive access to index the WSJ isn't going to help, because anyone who actually cares about what the WSJ has to say specifically will just go to the WSJ site, not to Bing.
This would be a waste of MS money, and would hurt the WSJ by having them be found less often (Bing isn't yet as popular as Google, as I understand things), thus getting them less hits and less notice. Unless Murdoch doesn't care about the WSJ's future, this is overall likely a bad move for him.
If Bing wants the traffic, they have to return better results. Eventually, that will translate into users, but it's not a quick thing.
This would be a stupid move on Microsoft's part, and probably a bad plan on Murdoch's part. That doesn't mean they won't go forward, but it's a dumb idea all around.
A thousand pounds of wood moving at 300 feet per minute. Don't get in the way.
Murdoch seems to think that people use Google to search Murdoch's sites.
By Murdoch's logic, clearly if he withdraws his sites from Google, people will stop using Google to search his sites. But hardly anyone using Google has the intention of "searching his sites". People just want information--most people don't care which site has the information as long as it's good information. If Murdoch pulls out of Google that just means fewer people will visit Murdoch's sites. Nobody is going to give a toss about the fact that Fox won't show up on Google. This entire strategy suggests that Murdoch misunderstands his own readers.
Google on one side.
Microsoft and Murdoch on the other.
Gee... I wonder who the public will side with?
Sure, Microsoft once beat Mozilla who was burning up cash, but that memory will loom large with Google who has bucketloads of cash and more importantly: smarter people that those old dinosaurs. Microsoft these days is a poor imitator. News Corp is irrelevant unless you like spoonfed opinionated news. My money is on Google.
1. So why doesn't Murdoch just put a robots.txt file in his sites? It's because he WANTS them to be indexed ... but he also wants to get $$$ for it.
2. So his sites will appear on bing and not google? Sounds like the quality of google searches just went up.
3. I'm sure the sites that will replace NewsCorp properties in the searches can't believe that Christmas came early.
As long as Bing keeps sorting the results based on the website's popularity rather than the page's relevance I don't see myself ever using Bing.
Well, if it's the former, Google has its own "Do no evil" thing that they're supposed to abide by.
This whole story irritates me. Microsoft is employing the whole, "If you can't beat them, find some way to leverage your stockpiles of cash to manipulate the market." If Bing really is a better search engine, people will start using it. Let it compete on its merits.
He doesn't want to change robots.txt.
He wants to change laws and get the blessing of governments to fence off the internet and make money out of it. That is why there have been a lot of speeches and a lot of noise and the implication that we are all a pile a leeches.
It may look like an ignorant bull in a china shop but that isn't what is happening. He knows what he's doing, he's just prepared to break all the rules and turn the net into a virtually worthless thing in comparison to what it is now so long as he is making more money out of it that he is now.
Now I don't have to append -site:fox.com to my search results to filter out the lies. Thank you for going to all this trouble.
What good is robots.txt if a site that crawls pages ignoring the rules set is then indexed by google?
I'd be willing to bet that if Fox News had a blanket ban on bots in the robots.txt, putting the opening sentence of a Fox News story into google would still return dozens of news sites that had ripped the first paragraph or two from their site.
Poor Fox - they think their content is important enough to change the behavior of the entire web surfing public. Newsflash - it's not.
I wonder if Rupert Murdoch has ever used Google for anything. When I do a Google News search, I get the beginnings of articles that link right to the newspaper site to read them. All I get from Google is an aggregation showing me what articles are available on a topic. Even if you put the content itself behind a paywall (the last great idea that didn't pan out for the news industry) I'd still just see that teaser paragraph. I still don't understand where the "theft" thing comes from.
Now if the entire news industry rose up in unison to lock out search engines it might have a small impact on the habits of users, but as long as there are some holdouts and/or wire feeds online one or two providers dropping out will have no real impact.
Except for Fox's losing some eyeballs as a result of this I don't see how it works out for anyone. Sure, they get some money that Microsoft is willing to waste, but still - the loss of eyeballs will drive their ad rates down and it'll all probably wash out.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Exactly! Google is too big to "hurt" with this nonsense. Other newspapers will benefit from the absence of News Corp. On the flip side, News Corp papers will suffer from the loss of traffic Google drove to their sites. In the end old Rupert does nothing but gives his competitors more business and takes away traffic and ad revenue from his own sites.
I personally have no interest in Murdoch's news sites and I would pay to have an index that excluded all of his publications. They are either sensationalist trash or blatantly biased news sources.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
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.
How is he going to do this when nobody who works for him has actually written a news item themselves (rather than just repeated a press release or copied directly from AP or Reuters) for years?
Making Google pay for "content" is like charging the guy on the corner you ask directions from ten bucks.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Now that really shows you have no clue - for his entire long life he's been surrounded by technical people in his inner circle that have told him when to backtrack away from a bad idea. Ask the English press if he's a dinosaur that never considers technical issues and has no experts to advise him and they will laugh at you and mention Wapping. He's an evil old bastard but he's not a stupid old bastard and he's had a chunk of online commerce only a couple of years after Microsoft noticed that there was an internet out there.
I'm not sure if he even cares much about what Microsoft or Google do - I think Google is the strawman used in all the noise he's raising to get the attention of governments to change the internet into something he can more easily make money out of. Of course it's all overblown bullshit that he is spouting, but he's made millions that way by spouting lies and carving up the corpses of the companies of those that fell for them.
Microsoft seems to have a long history of not understanding the Internet. Witness them being very late to the party with Internet Explorer, and then not being smart enough to figure out that they should set a default home page to their sites with early versions of IE. And then the various attempts at lock-in and biased search results over the years.
I can't help but think this is yet another example of Microsoft attempting to make the Internet into something that they want it to be, something that benefits only them, rather than something that benefits society as a whole. People won't change their habits so easily, they'll just use whatever sites come up in Google. This will be a boon to those sites that remain in the Google index.
Popularity over relevance is the basis for government.
Are you some kind of anarchist?
If Microsoft is serious about this, why haven't they "deindexed" MSNBC from Google? The internet would be a better place if that site disappeared anyway..
"Wow, you assign him so much credit. Do you think he actually has any technical people in his inner circle who dare tell him he's acting like a buffoon?"
Yes, you don't get that rich by surrounding yourself with sicophants but you might keep a few of them around for when you want to demonstrate who's in charge. I'm also pretty sure Murdoch is not above playing the old fool card when it's convienient to do so. Having said that I agree the story he is currently telling everyone is that he will cut off his nose to spite his face.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I believe most of the time, historically, when this occured it was because the site based what was served up on the user agent accessing the site. Thus, content providers could allow Googlebot to completely index the site so that it showed up in Google's search results, however when an actual user showed up at the site they would receive a "Subscribe Now" type of page.
I remember that used to be the case with experts-exchange.com; if you set your browser agent to Googlebot you could see the search results, otherwise you ended up with a "Subscribe Now" page. They have since changed that so that even Google's cached page is a Subscribe page. Whoever does SEO for that site sure knows his tricks.
I agree completely with your assessment that "those sites piss me off" and regardless of how good a service they might provide I refuse to use them on principal.
What you are saying (in your first paragraph) is technically true, but is orthogonal to the Google issue. It seems like most people (not necessarily you, I don't know) who talk about "Google stealing news stories for free" never go to google news. Google new *does not re-display news stories*! All Google news does is present a bunch of links to stories, together with about one or two sentences so you get the gist of the story. To read the news, you have to go to the *actual web site* of the newspaper (or whatever).
If the newspaper can make money by selling web ads or whatever, it still gets that revenue, so Google doesn't affect it one way or another, except perhaps *increase* the newspaper's ad revenue by sending searchers to their web page.
The question still remains, however, is whether people drop their newspaper subscriptions because they can read it on line for free at the newspaper's website. But again, that is separate from what google news does.
What really is killing the newspaper business is not loss of subscriptions, but rather loss of classified ads that have all gone to craigslist.
Hear, fucking hear. Google should call this wanker's bluff and do the world a favour.
"Did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?"
the dinosaur is sensing his extinction
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I do, however, appreciate Al Jazeera. They have a fresh open view that gives me new perspectives and insights and I look forward to their text and TV offerings. I would be upset if I couldn't get access to them.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
I agree completely and I wonder why this is not considered an antitrust issue. I thought this behavior is basically the definition of antitrust; Using your monopoly in one market to force out competition in another market. Between paying off Murdoch *and* setting Bing as the default search engine in MS products, is this not illegal monopoly behavior?
Hear, hear! I've been trying for years to get Google to let you selectively filter things out from the results lists in both the news and web search. If it is from FOXNews or experts-exchange, I won't even click on it. That screen space is wasted to me, and I would rather use it on something potentially useful.
To be fair Google also pays browser makers to include them as the default search engine instead of competitors.
Microsoft is going to kill Google the way they killed Netscape.
That reminds me of a kid claiming he's going to kill a bear with a bb gun. Google is not Netscape.
This move would be bad for MSFT and bad for News Corp, which means I'm not seeing a downside. If MSFT was smart, they would pass on this deal.
The next thing Murdoch would come out with is the News Corp search engine.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Maybe Microsoft will learn the distinction between money and value before the damage gets too bad.
Is this really the only way Microsoft can make their products look good, by overtly attempting to damage competitors' products?
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
Which means he doesn't actually have to be all that smart.
I'm not sure that Fox News or the rest of Newscorp actually caries any information that the other western news networks omit. It's all homogeneous. The only distinction between Newscorp's output and everyone else's is that it's pre-digested into a commentary-heavy form of "news entertainment".
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
LOL Didn't know Murdoch owned Russia today and jezeera now. Way to be off topic. I'm glad your the type of person who likes to confuse the discussion with your goofball politics. Take a hike
What Murdoch really wants is for Google to pay him for the privilege of linking to his paywall.
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
I really see no reason why Google shouldn't be allowed to do exactly what it's doing, because it's providing a search service. Sites have the ability to opt out if they want.
Current search engine users are almost exclusively Google users. If people almost exclusively get their news by searching, they have no site loyalty and almost exclusively get their news from whatever sites Google sends them, and therefore when the news sites drop off Google, they will stop visiting those sites.
I think you're missing the point of Murdoch and Ballmer's pitch. At the moment, the public believe that Google is the best search site. But if they start to hear that Google doesn't include a lot of household name sites -- like The Times, The New York Times, The Sun, Sky News, Fox News, etc -- that perception suffers actually even if you are not a Times reader. If Google is missing a famous (whether or not frequently visited) chunk of the web, but Bing has it, then that hurts Google's reputation. And Google lives or dies by reputation -- despite all they do with email etc, there is very little "vendor lock-in" to a search box. I think it's a smart play by Ballmer -- he's decided that whether or not they could beat Google on quality, that alone probably wouldn't be enough to win back the market -- so they'll try to beat them on perceived coverage as well.
This is more proof that Microsoft should be seperated into smaller companies. It can't be that they use the Billions made from Windows and Office monopoly to destroy competitors in other markets, like they try for example with the Xbox, Windows Mobile, and now Bing.
While most of you seem not to care if newscorp content gets delisted from Google, I'm sure Google cares. What Microsoft is doing is anti-trust and illegal, expect a lawsuit from Google if this goes through. They could easily win this case, not only is it anti-competitive behavior from a badly behaving monopoly but it is also a form of racketeering to buy off customers to ruin a business.
I couldn't have agreed more with you ... until you said "death cult". Most followers of Islam aren't like that, and I'm sure you know it.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
Paying to be included isn't the same as paying so your competition is excluded.
There's a Greasemonkey script (also works as a Chrome extension) to block Fox News & WSJ posts from Google News.
WRT experts-exchange, you can click on the Google cache of the page, scroll down to the bottom, and there's your answers. That's their trick for getting Google to index them so highly. This trick also works if you set your browser's user agent to Googlebot's.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
On a more serious note, though, about Fox News. Closing your eyes to one perspective, can only diminish you. Even if the only thing you lose is a window into other's ways of thinking, that's a valuable thing you.
Normally, I would agree with this...however, Fox News (along with the rest of the mainstream media...CNN, MSNBC, etc.) exists SOLELY to sell ads and opinions, not the news. I don't need to listen to someone who is paid to tell me what to think; I'm quite capable of forming my own political opinion, thank you very much.
I completely agree with listening to sources other than those you agree with, but listening to a "news" channel Like Fox News (again, MSNBC/CNN/etc. included) really is a waste of time.
Living With a Nerd
Well you are the same guy who thinks Glen Beck is great. So I don't see much credibility in your post really. And anyone going to Fox while knowing how much they lie and spread propaganda and gin up their own rallies, create their own news etc. well they are just looking for loons to confirm their beliefs and FOX does that every well actually. I hope Murdoch de-indexes from Google. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Excellent point. Although I think that this will never work (explanation here), if it does, it's bad precedent.
Currently, web sites compete to offer the best content, and search engines compete to help you most easily find the best sites. The best sites and search engines win. If somebody created a search algorithm tomorrow that kicked Google's butt, they could win the market.
If these guys succeed, search engines will stop competing on quality and start competing on their ability to make backroom deals about what they can index. Great new search engines and great new web sites will fail, because they're too small to make deals with the big players.
In short, this would ruin a lot of what makes the internet a worldwide competition for awesomeness, and turn it into a bunch of fragmented corporate ghettos. And everyone would lose.
I hear enough about the "perspective" of Fox News to know that it isn't worth my time to listen to them, the "reporting" mixes in opinion blatantly, an actual news organization at least tries to appear neutral by attempting to be aware of their bias and tempering it. On the other hand, Fox revels in its bias and seems to even try to amplify it. The denial or omission of easily proven facts by Fox News because these facts don't fit with the Fox News view of the world makes the network lose credibility as well. I guess that it would not be so bad if their reporting at least tried to explain the context of a situation, but instead, the editors allow what can only be intentional errors. Having opinionated commentators separate from the reporting is fine in a news organization, but the anchors at Fox News often add their own bias and opinion into the mix or instead parrot the biases and opinions that they are given. If any of their commentators were actually intelligent and interesting I might have a different opinion, but instead are blatantly ignorant and try to avoid increasing their level knowledge and understanding. There is perhaps some contextual information in the statements to be made by those on Fox News. Which, I suppose means that at least that they aren't just running SCIgen on a new vocabulary list of words each day. Still the statements fall short of actually being reasonable, rational, factual, and reflecting the real world. When Fox News announces that it is reforming itself in an acceptable fashion, I may check it out again. However, until that time I just don't care.
Seriously, in terms of credibility, I would consider Fox news less credible and informative, in general, than the "People's Daily" at http://english.people.com.cn/ which is an organ of the Chinese Communist Party. Hell, Fox News makes Aljazeera look unbiased. Even without a direct comparison to Fox News, Aljazeera is still reasonably credible, truthful, and has a fair degree of editorial independence.
Impersonating Tycho from Penny Arcade since before there was a PA.
Google has had competitors for as long as it has been around. If you compare Google's share of search to Microsoft's share of OS installs, you'll see the difference.
If Microsoft manages this, it won't take long before Microsoft does have an effective monopoly on search as well - between their making it hard to set Google as the default search provider in IE and perhaps taking over indexing of major news sites, it wouldn't take all that much to make Google a secondary player in the short run and potentially kill it in the longer term.
Microsoft supposes people will simply all jump to Bing because a few websites don't get indexed by Google.
What it probably didn't notice, is that nobody really realizes this, and just goes to another news website the search pops up instead. To me it just seems that both Murdoch and Microsoft are loosing cash. I'm pretty happy with this.
All Google has to do is create its own "Google News", maybe with some fancy roll-overs with well-written but brief summaries. Reporters are cheap these days due to shrinkage. That'll scare the news industry like nobody's mother and they'll come running back begging to be included. Google is the New Microsoft: every twitch they make sends entire industries into frantic tizzies.
Table-ized A.I.
More to the point: if you have lots of money and friends in high places, you can get accused, judged guilty on both sides of the Atlantic and sentenced, and still walk away victorious. It's a bit similar how you can drive your company into bankcrupty, demand government subsidy, pay said subsidy to yourself as a bonus for a job well done, fire a shitload of your employees whos taxes paid for the subsidy in the first place, and still not get punished.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Murdoch isn't paying Google to index their sites.
How could he sue them for simply refusing to do something they aren't required to do in the first place.
Equitable estoppel (spelling?) only counts for specified contracts.
You simply stop providing a free, no-obligation service when you want.
You can't even count a Google EULA in this matter as Google is the one indexing the content.
It would trivial for them to argue that the increased legal concerns have given them cause to drop them from the index.
If you did want to argue equitable estoppel, Google could make a complaint just as valid (read not very) as Murdoch could.
Murdoch has been allowing Google to index its sites all this time (they use robots.txt and haven't blocked Google), and by specifically refusing them now, while not limiting any other search engines is causing damage to Google's business.
I think it's a horrible idea, somewhere on par with that obsession with buying Yahoo in the past. We're still laying off people, and can afford to spend money on something as obviously doomed to fail as this? And also get all covered in shit in the process by dealing with Murdoch of all people, giving plenty of ammunition for more anti-Microsoft sentiment? Not to mention the whole "can't compete on your own merit" angle. Gah.
I actively ignore Murdoch's results; I don't care what his mouthpieces have to say. But if I were an average websurfer, I wouldn't have any particular allegiance. In fact, I'd probably just click the first link in Google News - which is frequently Fox etc. If that disappears from the Google News page, most people wouldn't even notice and just keep going to the BBC, or CNN, or NY Times, or whatever is first.
Google is under threat here - in fact, their entire business model (do good search to get ad exposure) is under attack.
Murdoch wants to change the Internet to be more favorable to him. In order to do this, he needs laws. To get laws, he must need them, or appear to need them. So he pretends people stealing his content are a big problem. He paints Google as stealing his content by indexing it in order to use as a news source.
Murdoch knows he can stop Google indexing his site at any time. In fact, he (or his minions) already have robots.txt pointing Google to Google-friendly sitemaps. But he doesn't want to do that, because he doesn't get paid for taking that route.
No - Murdoch wants Google to use his content, and wants to charge them for that. He wants to force them to do that. That would hopefully (to Murdoch) force anybody excerpting his content to pay for it
Goldmine.
Google's whole business model is excerpting content, for the purposes of search.
Google should be proactive here, in order to protect their business model. Some possible actions:
* Exclude Murdoch proactively. His online offerings would disappear in 6 months' time.
* Similarly, tell him to "put up or shut up" by giving him a public weeks' notice. Murdoch would have to fold because he needs Google much more than Google needs him.
* Sue Murdoch for defamation/libel. He is explicitly accusing Google of a crime - if Google didn't commit this crime (they're legally well-protected), he will lose.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
If Microsoft has any strategists at all, they must see the bind they're in, though. Google is charting a future where all information is free, all consumer software is free, CPU cycles are free, and the OS is irrelevant; all will be paid for by advertising. That leaves Microsoft without a future outside of their X-Box division, unless they can make Bing popular enough to take away Google's business and wrest away that vision for themselves (either to embrace it, or to kill it).
Although giving the top 1000 sites a million dollars each to delist from Google would be a futile and crazy move, you can still see why Microsoft would consider spending that kind of money if there were any chance of success.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
pissed off and demanding Ballmer's head on a pike. How does pumping Microsoft's cash into the coffers of News Corp improve things for Microsoft or Microsoft's stockholders? Yeah, it's a great deal for News Corp's stock holders. I mean how bloody stupid is Steve Ballmer anyways? He's going to spend a bunch of money not trying to compete with Google but instead with having a temper tantrum because Microsoft's efforts to compete with Google have been so lame.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
I installed Chrome the other day for my father. I was horrified when I was showing him how he could do searches from the URL box that it was set by default to be Bing. I don't know if MS does that or if for some reason Google is (I can't imagine they would), but my experience doesn't really jive with what you are saying.
In fact, your whole post smells a bit. Are you getting paid to write these things?
All the news sites won't drop google. If Murdoch does, there will be plenty of others where people will get their news. And quite frankly, good riddance to Murdoch if he does. He is responsible for so many awful things happening in his country all so that he can "win" in the game of how much money can you make. He is really a blight on the world.
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