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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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
Paying to be included isn't the same as paying so your competition is excluded.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.