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.'"
That's funny. I'm the type of person that *looks* for alternative sources like FOX, CBN, al-Jezeera, Russia Today, and so on. They provide information that the CNNs and DNCNBCs of the world do not. I find it odd that you'd want to self-limit yourself to only seeing one side.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Yeah, I think he's a greedy jack***, and I disagree with his politics, but I really don't see why Google should be allowed to scrape someone else's content and serve it up out of a search interface where they're making the ad revenue. And the argument that it drives more poeple to a site, raising their ad revenue doesn't really hold either. After all, Google is the biggest fish in that business as well - they get paid both ends. And they really turn remarkably little over to the web site in question.
And while a lot of Slashdot readers might not like News Corp, plenty of folks do.
Google never should have been allowed to buy Doubleclick, for starters. They need to learn to be a "good parasite". They haven't figured it out yet.
Maybe because Google is the one with the monopoly on search, not MS?
Try harder next time, Microsoft cheerleader. You've been so pro-Microsoft in your posting history that one has to wonder if you're just a paid shill rather than just misinfomed.
Bing results as good as Google's? Are you out of your mind?
The Wolfram Alpha crap is just that, mostly crap, useless to almost everyone. Microsoft couldn't have added a less important partner had they tried.
Microsoft is going to kill Google the way they killed Netscape.
You know... WinNT 4.0 was a "Unix Killer" and Windows 2000 was a "Mainframe Killer."
MS killed Netscape because MS gained the edge in development of HTML and JavaScript standards. Obviously Netscape couldn't compete with gorilla R&D of MS to keep up with all stuff from standards to implement. On other side, Opera for a long time was a non-free-as-beer browser and they are still doing pretty fine. So I guess the problem was with Netscape itself, not with whom they were competing with.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
I am seriously considering only reading blogs also, to be honest.
But, I understand the complaint many people have about fox news being the only one not toeing barack's party line. That alone is reason enough to look at their news if I happen to catch it though.