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.'"
I think Google operates on the "if anyone can see it, it can be indexed" line of thought...
That is, if anyone can find News Corp data on Bing, then Google's web crawlers should be able to as well.
The end result is Google will still index all public content via Bing, and Microsoft will pay out the ass until they wisen up.
Or Microsoft could require viewers to login to Bing, but that would kinda limit the exposure to the material... which is a pretty good thing for mankind when you consider this includes quality "news" outlets like FOX News.
I don't know if there have ever been any legal decisions about the legality of indexing publically available info... I'm guessing this would be the easiest move for Google. Or they might do something very radical that no one expects...
Interesting thing is that this will also limit how much Google can spend on their side products, which are direct competition against Office. About Chrome OS vs. Windows I wouldn't worry so much, as Chrome OS wont run any other programs on the computer than a web browser.
Lots of people always seem to note that this wouldn't hurt Google because if people want news from certain sites they just go to the site directly. 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. This is even more true with both Bing's and Google's News search. Bing is starting to be nicer to use than Google, has nifty features (like providing useful results from Wolfram Alpha, integrating Wikipedia nicely, etc) and the search results quality is on par with Google. Bing is also more stylish than Google for "casual people", but while maintaining Google-like simple interface.
And before someone has to jump on the "but only reason people use Bing is because it's default search engine in IE8!". This is no different tactic to gain users what Google uses too. They pay Firefox, Opera and other browsers and even computer manufacturers like Dell to have Google as the default search engine. But neither party overwrites the previous setting, like many seem to say about IE8 - it doesn't change it if Google is already set there.
Google is even more problematic because of the amount of datamining they do. Their analytics tracking code is everywhere on the internet, with Android and Chrome OS you are always logged-in to your Google account (just to use your phone, wtf?). Both Bing and Google do some hidden datamining on back too (like when you click a link, theres javascript that sends info about what link you clicked on the back). But this is worse with Google, as their complete business model relies around datamining to provide info and services to advertisers.
It's actually interesting how much they have improved their search engine from MSN/Live age. Seems they're going after Google at full force now and it seems to make sense to attack them from every direction now.
Murdoch-Microsoft Deal In the Works
Thank you! Finally some good news. These hatred consolidation programs cut my insane ranting down significantly and gives me more time to appreciate the finer things in life like making intricate tinfoil feathers to put into my tinfoil pimp hats. I applaud Murdoch & Ballmer for finally thinking of people like me. But it may be too little too late, ever since the government subsidized hatred and what with the sub-prime hatred rate financial crisis, I've been forced to cut down on hating as much as forty or fifty percent. Tough times we live in. Tough times.
My work here is dung.
'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.'
Which is just as well because I've never heard anyone accuse Murdoch of being more than half way towards being an evil genius.
I'm pretty sure that Murdoch will hate M$ for this step. No, I'm serious.
He's in the publishing industry. In other words: Perception and stories are his trade. The whole "Google is stealing from us" angle is an excellent story and contains a number of great opportunities to profit (from the government if you threaten loss of jobs, from Google if you threaten lawsuits, etc.) - but what M$ is doing is essentially calling his bluff.
Now he'll either have to go along with it, and de-index his sites, which will result in page views coming down crashing, or have everyone and his dog dig out the old stories and say "wasn't so bad after all, was it, old liar?".
He's probably already busy trying to find a way out without loss of face.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
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.
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.
If Murdoch's poisonous right wing tat is removed from Google, at least it is improving the filtering of results by removing nonsense that I definitely wouldn't want to read.
We're all winners is this happens!
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.
In a similar move, the train manufacturers asked the electricity companies to abruptly change the voltage delivered to the tracks, so that the train companies can only buy their trains.
SUV manufacturers asked the road workers to build a 30 cm high bump along the center of all the lanes - so that consumers must buy an SUV to drive on the roads.
I'd almost call this sabotage...
And whatever this does - every penny spent on it should NEVER count as economic growth. From a consumer's point of view, this is wasted money. Instead of improving a service, they try to destroy one.
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.
Well, not really an issue. I'd actually PREFER that "news items" from newscorp (e.g., FOX News, etc.) be filtered out of any news search I do anyway ... as these folks aren't actually news organizations.
[I! Love! This! Company!] YEEEEAAAAAH!
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
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.
what is the legal status of NOT honoring a robot.txt, at least hypothetically?
or for that matter, simply linking to another website who has told you "don't link to me"
in other words, if someone says don't link to me, and you link to them, is that a matter of illegality or is there a legal basis for someone to sue in civil court? on what grounds?
its a valid question. and certainly one with broad reaching ramifications
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Blogs will still continue to report on news that is reported on at NewsCorp sites, and blogs sure aren't being de-indexed. So why will t
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.
It seems a bit presumtuous to declare a successful multibillionaire is making a fatal mistake, especially seeing as I'm just a multithousandaire. That being said, history is replete with examples of people, organizations, and empires that gained enormous success in a given environment but were unsuited to adapting to changes in that environment.
Murdoch seems to want to turn back the clock, put the toothpaste back in the tube. I don't think this is possible. The Internet is a highly disruptive technology and if it wasn't Google then some other company would be playing the same role.
Of course, just ten years back we had starry-eyed boffins chortling over how the internet meant all brick and mortar retail was dead, nobody would go shopping anymore, etc. They kind of missed the boat on that one. Internet retail is just a very fancy form of mail-order. The internet might kill certain categories of store (used record shops, new record shops, and digital delivery promises to render blockbuster and gamestop obsolete though it's far too early to declare a time of death) but grocery stores aren't going anywhere. Used bookstores will still get foot traffic for the near future and things like the amazon zshop allows those independents to sell nationwide.
I think Murdoch is trying to hold back the incoming tide on this one.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
there is not a lot of original news reporting done anyway. Most reporters just copy the stories from somewhere. Any original investigative reporting done by News Corp will be exclusive till the next reporter rewrites the story the other day.
Oh well, good riddance.
"Rupert Murdoch is pointing a gun to Google's head, and Microsoft is helping him pull back the trigger."
Oh old Rupert, is it really Google's head, or did you write G O O G L E on your toes? (Yeah that's right, Rupert Murdoch has 6 toes on each foot, you heard it here first!)
You just got troll'd!
I buy it on a Saturday for a bit of a laugh at Clarkson and the TV guide. I've never visited the Sun website, nor would I. I don't know what this Wall Street Journal of his is like but I can't think of much reason to Google that either. Would I miss stories that appear in my unrelated google searches, um no I wouldn't, so go on Mr. Murdoch, take your tat out of my search results, see if I, or anyone else, really cares.
This man who turned journalists into the story factories they now are.
"Never let the facts get in the way of a good story" - I'm sure that this was a Murdoch quote.
Has obviously decided he is sorry for the hurt he has caused and now wishes to remove all the crap fiction that is vomited out of news corp from the poor (emphasis on poor ) innocent internet users.
I for one want to say thank you Rupert Murdoch.
I don't use Bung, and I never read any of Murdochs tripe. Yawn.
is the potentate actually cracking under the pressure of a shrinking media empire?
or is he crazy like a fox (pun intended), and shaking the cage in a calculated way, to make some tangentially related issue fall off its perch in such a way that it aids him subtly, indirectly. something that makes the contrived brouhaha worth the effort?
i don't know what that fallen thing would be: a rearranged legal landscape, an altered business environment, a share price somewhere... who knows
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
...this is prima facie evidence that Google's "Don't be evil" policy is working very, very well.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
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."
Who, in their right mind, would want to read anything Rupert Murdoch publishes?? IMHO, the world would be a far better place if Rupert wasn't in the nuz business.
Wherever you go, there you are.
or reverse psychology:
"no, you can't see fox news. i forbid you to read fox news! i am preventing you google from indexing fox news"
(everyone clicks to fox news to see what the big deal is)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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
Page Three ..
There sure is some strange logic in this deal, especially from the news moguls. 99,9% of all searches regarding news or a topic is about getting information about it regardless of the source.
When someone do a search for something, the quality of the pages is the interesting part, not where those pages resides. If its pointing to a blogger, Wikipedia or a newspaper is totally irrelevant just as long as the information is correct. By removing their own content the newspapers are only encouraging bloggers and the like.
I cant see people jumping ship towards Bing to get better results. Its much more likely people will be put off when any search on Bing leads to a paying newspaper instead of to that blog you want to find.
HTTP/1.1 400
The people who "read" his papers (some English readers may remember the joke in Porridge) do so to have their prejudices confirmed, not to find things out. Murdoch is trying to keep his readers happy by showing them that people are prepared to pay to have his views presented to them, thus providing additional prejudice confirmation. If other people are prepared to spend money to find out that Palin or Bach are wonderful and not at all dysfunctional in any way whatever, and that Obama is a racist and the Anti-Christ, then holding these views clearly has value. It's like the people who think that the Daily Telegraph is a reliable newspaper because it's still printed in big, impressive broadsheet format, and not all because the Barclay brothers don't think paper has a future and don't want to invest in new presses.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
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.
If anything, this one is a killer deal!
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..
If it goes through Murdock is an idiot.
1. Google could litigate this for YEARS after an injunction
2. I wonder if the advertisers on those sites will mind if the number of eyeballs looking at their ads as a result of being on a search engine that currently has a MUCH smaller market share? My guess it that they will demand to pay LESS.
Now if the big news sites suddenly drop from Google but can be found via Bing, people are going to change there
I don't understand how news sites are going to drop from Google. I guess I need to RTFA? It's a public internet; unless Murdoch's sites are encrypted there's no way, legal or technological, to keep Google from indexing them unless Googles wants to stop indexing them.
Plus, I don't know how many news outlets Murdoch ("Morlock?) owns, but guess what? Nobody needs Murdoch or his newspapers. Personally, I dislike the man's ideas and politics and the slant he puts in the news. I, for one, would welcome Murdoch sites not being listed on Google -- if it could happen, which I don't believe it can.
Is the Financial Times a Murdoch paper?
Free Martian Whores!
Wait. Let me get this straight. Which is it? "Senseless riches" or is M$ Cutting into Google's margins? Seems to me that M$'s motives are pretty clear, and the riches being expended are not senseless but calculated.
http://www.beanleafpress.com
I vote that /. excludes Bing from it's robots.txt. We don't want their kind here.
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
Leave it to Microsoft to know that they can't beat Google it a FAIR game. So they have to lower the playing field and hurt all of us. Microsoft's next move will probably be outlawing broadband so YouTube won't work well.
I'd love to get my morning Google News fix without getting a face full of ultra-paranoid right-wing wing-wang from any of the Murdoch-owned properties. It's like someone putting the goatse guy in the newspaper, on the fourth page...
Why can't I mod "-1 Idiot"?
All the talk of going on the Google cold turkey regimen makes a lot of sense now. Well, it makes sense in that they were negotiating a deal to give up on Google while he was making doing all the talking about it. I can't see this as a positive for either party. Bing will still be an also-ran, and Fox website traffic will drop. Like has been said blogs will still let people know some stuff, and that will be on Google results. The information will still be out there for people to "steal", but they lose in every other way. I can see a consumer backlash over this.
My question is this: Will they go after news aggregators next? If not then they're doomed to fail in this. Still on blogs and aggregators, but traffic still goes down.
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
The real story here is that AOL, Comcast, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, and Murdoch will form a company called Evil Holdings.
Okay, maybe not. But I was just carrying things to their obvious conclusion. And Boing-Boing seems to agree. Look at the photo of Ballmer and Murdoch and see the evil. The photo file is named Balldock and Mumer. (Should have been Balldoch and Murmer.)
If they do this, Bing will forever be charged for news. Not only from Murdoch's site, but everyone else will want in on the money.
What happens when it's time to renew the contract? Highest bidder? Stay with Bing? Move to Google?
MS needs to be very careful. Short-term gain (if any) for long-term pain it seems to me.
Vip
the dinosaur is sensing his extinction
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Evil, meet Evil. I think you two will get along just great.
I wonder if Microsoft understand what they've started? Wikipedia should immediately demand payment from Microsoft to be listed on Bing. I've pretty sure Microsoft gains more out of that relationship that Wikipedia does.
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.
Now my google-searches will not be peppered with fox-news results.
Which means he doesn't actually have to be all that smart.
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.
It is one thing to out perform another company but when one enters into talks and mentions limiting another company you can just hear the DOJs lawyers gearing up for the trials. The trouble that I have with this is that Microsoft pays fines but the fines, although seeming large, are not enough to stop them from illegal actions. And messing about with Google is a dangerous as Google has the resources to really fight back.
"I'm pretty sure that Murdoch will hate M$ for this step. No, I'm serious"
'The impetus for the discussions came from News Corp, owner of newspapers ranging from the Wall Street Journal of the US to The Sun of the UK, said a person familiar with the situation, who warned that talks were at an early stage'
'However, the Financial Times has learnt that Microsoft has also approached other big online publishers to persuade them to remove their sites from Google's search engine'
wait...what? isn't that a bad thing to do when your company is constantly being "under suspicion" and investigated for anti-trust violations?
Google can just throw the "anti-trust/anti-competitive" card in the mix and Microsoft will yet again be subjected to government scrutiny, much like that gray dude in the Trucker's Delight video....
This is clearly a signal that RM is suffering cognitive decline. On one hand, he is charging the end-market for poor quality content (while his competition makes beter content freely available) On the other, he will reduce the cumulative average number of search-hits by about 83%. So he will be stuck selling to a deceasing market at higher and higher prices. I guess that is appealing to advertisers of Yachts and Rolexen, but as a business plan, it 5ux big time.
Your mistake: there are only two sides. Sometimes there is only one side.
Sometimes "the other side" is not the side that says the other side is just wrong.
And "balance" isn't "reading two sides" but appropriately determining the relevance of a source for inclusion or discarding.
And most often, Fox News has no relevance and isn't "the other side".
E.g. the "other side" of AGW isn't WUWT. It's actually within the IPCC reports. It's called "science" where you say what supports and isn't supported (and the range of ideas of variant strength of support by the evidence). And the IPCC reports contain all that.
Yet people consider there *has* to be another side and "the other side" has to disagree with the proponents.
So instead of looking in the IPCC reports for the balance, they look to CA et al.
They aren't the other side, they are irrelevant since they merely disagree with the IPCC which IS NOT the alternative view.
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Can survive the armada of chairs thrown at them ...
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 lost. And frankly, you'd lose more. One recent idiocy that needs seriously needs counterbalancing comes to mind : I for one find "pre-traumatic stress" a thoroughly unsatisfactory explanation of murdering innocents after shouting "allah akbar". In fact it seems to me that the major himself linked this to his religion. Details like this are never hidden away when we're talking about the Balkans or Northern Ireland, a difference in reporting that embodies the very definition of racism. So, frankly I find the "pre-traumatic" idiocy racist to the bone : the MSNBC does not explain IRA attacks against the UK by any such psychobabble.
Everyone knows why, and I for one despise the rotting carcas of racism that is attempting to fall out the closet's door. If someone would explain to me why people of "that certain religion", which is proven more and more a death cult with each passing day, get preferential treatment.
All right! One old white man's failed paid-content business plan + another middle-aged clueless white man's failed search business = FAIL. This is great, they'll move millions of dollars from one account to the other so both can go out of business faster. Egggcellent.
Maury
Does this mean I will have to do without Fox articles on Google News in the future?
Because that will be a COMPLETE TRAGEDY. I would be DEVASTATED, I tell you.
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.
Don't be focused on the Rupert Murdoch and News Corp aspect of this story. They are just one content provider among many. This is all about the larger question of monetizing content vis-a-vis search. Remember, it was one week ago exactly when Slashdot reported on Mark Cuban's "Plan to Kill Google". Quality of search results matters. The idea of using search $$$ as an incentive to delist from competitive search engines is pretty serious now. If this catches on, you can be sure Google will counter-attack. I'm frankly surprised this has taken so long. If Google gets much more market share in search, they will be able to start changing the ad auction rules. Microsoft and Yahoo have precious little time. Whether this is brilliance or an act of desperation is yet to be determined.
3. I'm sure the sites that will replace NewsCorp properties in the searches can't believe that Christmas came early.
this is the real point that will be tested. is there intrinsic value in news production and presentation or not? if so then google has been getting a free ride on others valuable content. if not then this will bear out as a failure for newscorp.
I suspect newscorp is right. but I could be wrong. Th eevidence for this is that cable will pay to have Fox. And people will pay to have the WSJ. ANd people were willing to pay for sky news even when BBC was free.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I thought people here were more intelligent than that.
We all know what Rupert Murdoch's papers & government propaganda do...
http://nathanlindsell.blogspot.com/
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.
78 is not old... Okay maybe it is old. Get off my lawn dagnabit!
- Hey mummy, why is those dinosaurs over there dancing?
- That's not dancing, Timmy - Just the first stertors of agonic death. Don't pay attention to it.
- OK mum.
You didn't finish:
it's pre-digested into a commentary-heavy form of "news entertainment"...
...more blatantly than the other networks.
If a site is "de-listed", that's it. Google don't really care at all and there's not much that can or would ever want to do about that. And by not showing up on Google, nobody else really cares about those sites either.
Google can't and won't start "paying" sites to have them appear on Google. That would be the entire antithesis of any search engine's business model ("Hi, I'm Bing, I'm now a fake advert page for every result but someone in a back room is actually deciding who gets to post here!"). If they wanted that, they'd be selling those top-spots and not just having clear adverts/search results seperation like they do now - it's the same thing but the other way around (we-pay-them instead of they-pay-us). I can't think of a more stupid system to run a "search engine" on, even temporarily. It'll be like domain names all over again - hey Microsoft, I have a good article on X that's extremely popular - how much will you pay me to sell it to Bing?
It's a silly thing to do, and all that will happen is that Google will index pages that talk about why you can't get those sites through the search engine (because someone wants money). And because the Bing results won't even show up in Google either, you'll just never hear about those sites. People who want them will type them in directly (it's a newspaper, right? So it has the URL written on the heading of the front page) or favourite them, people who don't won't be aware they exist, and the "transition group" in between will never even see an article to let them decide if they like the style of reporting.
To be honest, when I search for a news story, I have *too many* newspapers and online news outlets fighting to supply me with facts. A few missing won't make me care at all, I'll just be even less exposed to their name/reputation/exclusives.
MS: Do it, make it bomb big-time, then see why the rest of the world was ignoring the pillock.
The whole "we're indexed by Google" story is just butchered. Nobody uses Google or any search engine to look for content on or drive traffic to a news site like the WSJ or Fox. The brand is already there and people just use it. AT most, people use Google to find where the WSJ site is. If these sites had content that got page ranked, or was useful, perhaps it would be different, but they don't. The real story here is that media sites have terrible content, and Rupert just doesn't get it.
So really, Microsoft is writing Fox a giant check to accomplish absolutely nothing. Microsoft should at least know better, even if Fox doesn't. But they don't, and that says miles about how dumb Redmond is these days.
Ballmer, you are moron!
This is my sig.
Rupert Murdoch has proven, yet again, that he is the smartest guy in the room. While everyone else in print media business is losing moeny hand over fist, he just found a way to wring money out of MSFT. Why isn't this guy running the country? He easilly the smartest guy in town.
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.
Or fantasy disguised as fact in order to sell more papers and captivate racists, sexists and haters?
Use the negative modifier in your query
-*example.com
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
"what is the legal status of NOT honoring a robot.txt, at least hypothetically?"
Although the copyright issues can be argued either way, the existence of the robots.txt and the willingness to follow it can be construed as asking and receiving permission. Since we on the Internet have established this convention of telling crawlers what we wish them to see, anything a crawler finds is authorized unless denied via robots.txt.
Is it a copyright violation to ignore robots.txt? The battle rages on. But only the truly clueless will argue copyright infringement for indexing something that could have been banned in robots.txt and wasn't.
I believe that this problem will solve itself. Last I heard, Murdoch was trying to put up a paywall around all of his content. That puts him on the fast track to irrelevance.
Robots.txt DOES have legal force: that of copyright.
By usage anything on a public webpage is copyable. It has to be else you can't get the text to read it says you can't make a copy. But a robots.txt file is how you stop a spider doing it. If you ignore a robots.txt file you are breaking copyright.
For humans, you have to put your private pages behind a login page or paywall and breaking that is likewise leaglly enforceable not by the act of making it a paywall or login but that bypassing it is
a) hacking the computer server
b) copyright infringement
PS DVDCSS doesn't present anything other than a trivial technical barrier. Neither now does the BluRay encrypt. It's still illegal to break them. ...It's been 3 hours, 21 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment...
Hey Rupert, your a big shot CEO - so just make the phone call and have your robots.txt file
edited to block Google and stop the whining!
As Google has stated - indexing news is not a big revenue source for them. Last time I checked
there are no ads on google news. The truth is that News Corp's content *on the internet* isn't worth
that much. There are hundreds if not thousands of other smaller operations that would gladly take
their place in Google's indexes. The value in these legacy media operations was the control they had
amassed over the *medium* (paper, broadcast signals) not their *content*, which as most of us know, on
average *sucks*
As for Microsoft....All I can say is that with business strategies like this they better hope they can keep
on selling office/windows for a long, long time. I would call this strategy a direct assault on themselves. Google
should encourage Microsoft to pay for as much content as possible to put pressure on Microsoft's bottom line.
I like Experts Exchange a lot better than the crapshoot of malware ridden generic "PC Tech forums" I find. They actually have good answers about half the time. Just my two cents, but yeah, FOX - News can go drown themselves. I try to be open minded, but as soon as someone tells me they only watch FOX I don't even engage in conversation with them anymore, and that comes from a formerly traditional republican!
"It's ok, I'm completely secure as long as my iron is off"
Which one is Sauron, and which one is Saruman?
Well, most of the news content on Fox is AP stories, so Murdoch doesn't really have a whole lot to 'steal' anyway. I'm not sure who would think it was a good idea to give him money for 'exclusive' search engine rights to content carried by every major news site. Maybe the deal is more about getting them to use Bing for the embedded search on the Fox sites, not really for the Google de-indexing?
All the noise Murdoch has been making lately is just posturing for technologically-challenged people in positions of power - his lawyers no doubt told him he had no legal basis ages ago.
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.
I hadn't really taken a good look at Google News prior to this. It seems to produce good, relevant results and I will probably switch over to using it for my daily news.
Thanks Rupert.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
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.
Last week my subway stop was closed. All around it were reporters desperately trying to get the story, but no one knew anything. A Brooklyn forum posted a thread about the death of two people and the subway outage. The forum had the news at least 4-8 hours before it was reported by a news agency (and they were getting it wrong.)
So the lesson is clear. People write better news than "The News" does. Murdoch wants to delist. He's already delisted. I don't read news from his sources. Blogs and Forums have much better news and are way better fact checked by the masses who have access to call BS when something is wrong.
I don't use Corporate News anymore because I don't want to know about what they think will get ratings. I want to know about the things that impact my life.
What? This is Murdoch?
Thank God. I thought we were talking about real news.
Carry on.
I have seriously been looking for a way to filter out Fox News from Google News (they add too much noise, IMHO). They will now do it for me :)
News Corp = Guy slipping over icy precipice.
Microsoft = A second guy tied to that first guy.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
This move will fail on many fronts. First, because of MS's monopoly, most MS users have learned over the years to associate the Microsoft brand with virus's, trojans, slowdowns, malware, expensive repairs, etc. etc. Bings increase in hits is only because of the heavy TV marketing that's been going on recently and also because its set as the default search engine on IE8 (an anti-competitive move I must add).
Socond, if Murdoch thinks people are just going to switch thier most favorite search engine for news that "doesn't show up any longer", he's a complete idiot. When I read the google news, I look at the headlines and click on the one's that I think are interesting, I just don't consider who's covering it. Why? see my last paragraph below. If news stories from News Corp suddenly don't show up on Google News anymore, I won't notice it, and most ordinary Google News readers won't either.
Third, seriously, this opens up a HUGE opportunity for those who know how the internet works to get the revenue and recognition that News Corp used to enjoy. Bloggers are going to go freaking crazy with this. Now, anyone on the internet with a blog will get some serious hits covering a story that News Corp is also covering.
And lets face it, big Media has been in control and feeding us crap for soooo long, the advent of the internet has brought to light the often biased and one-sided stories that we're all fed. You can BS some of the people some of the time, but not all of them all the time. Welcome to the Internet Murdoch. Adapt, or die. People love Google because Google does no Evil. Can Microsoft say the same? I for one am hopefull of never seeing another News Corp. story on the internet again.
Progress and quality journalism shall prevail with this move and another dinasour dies. Good riddance.
Google only allows you to browse the first 50 pages out of the the millions it boats it finds. Does Bing offer more?
In the past Yahoo! allowed one to search deeper into the web. Fravia did a write up on this a few years back. www.fravia.org
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.
Must disagree. I think that people who use the Web to get serious news don't look at those "brand names" anyway. They are not traditional newspaper readers. The newspaper publishers are failing, not because people don't want news in print, but because they don't believe the crap they put in print. Same goes for their web sites. Nothing can save them now.
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.
Apparently Microsoft were "on parole" of the USA DoJ until... last week. So they can do what they want again and don't have to feel like they have to hold back, like they did the past years.. erm..
He's probably several orders of magnitutde smarter than that idiot in the Whitehouse. Who gives a rat's @ss what his given slant is? He makes progress. Obama is another shill for banks and unions. Whopee, haven't seen him already.
If it gets News Corp content out of my Google News page, I'll be all the happier for it. You go, Rupert. Don't let the door hit you.
We already have a very politically segmented web. What happens once Bing becomes the search engine for Fox News watchers and Google for everything else? Are we going to end up with Bing creating a conservative, closed loop view of the world?
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.
Maybe those who are directed to Murdoch owned sites using Bing will simply discover that the products advertised there will cost more because those advertisers will be forced to pass on the cost of subsidizing the Murdoch's and Microsofts insatiable appetite for profits as Murdoc and Microsft collude to manipulate the advertising market. Once that news gets out, people will flock to Google as they will know its the search engine that will them better deals.
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.
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
It used to be pretty good until the Murdoch empire started quietly editing stories to be sure they benefited firms that in turn benefit Murdoch's ambitions. Now just as FOX news splices crowd scenes between non-related events to distort and misrepresent what is going on, the WSJ now increasingly slants both stories and manipulates financial result reporting to benefit their side of the trade. So few have caught on, because they don't check the published figures, instead they just rely on them as "news".
If Ruppert lost his nose, it would dramatically improve his appearance. Maybe thats he rationale for the deal. He discovered its cheaper than plastic surgery.
I mean, you can't really have a proper talk with him unless you spring him from the V.A. hospital - and then you've got to get him back inside before he's missed! And then when he's out he's gonna spend most of his time talking to his imaginary dog, anyway...
Bow-ties are cool.
You can still get plenty of news for free on the Internet!
Did you know that George Bush parachuted out of the airplanes just before they hit the WTC? I would not know that except for reading the free news. Also did you know that Al Gore is using global warming as a smokescreen to hide the thermal exhaust from his secret base under the ice cap from which he will enslave the world?
That's exactly the way how Microsoft would have invented the Internet. A closed network for the rich who can afford to pay.
I hope the public will be very vocal boycotting this "vision". I predict that someone will come up with a very strong Wall Street Journal competitor.
Microsoft is discussing paying News Corporation for the media company to remove its websites from Google and have them exclusively searchable via Microsoft Bob Hope, setting the scene for a search engine battle that could offer a ray of light to the newspaper industry, which has yet to construct an online business model that adequately replaces vast local monopoly ad revenues.
Rupert Murdoch, News Corp chairman, has said that he would use legal methods to prevent Google "stealing stories" published in his papers, including allowing Microsoft to pay him to add Google to a robots.txt file. "I'm always happy to do a deal with a careful, considered bloke like Steve Ballmer. His restraint is well-known, and he certainly wouldn't blow a massive cash surplus — I'm sorry, that's now a massive debt surplus — in a series of Hail Mary passes to try to fight Google on its heavily-defended high ground. His decision to give me buckets of cash is entirely reasonable and should be encouraged."
Microsoft has also approached other big online publishers to persuade them to remove their sites from Google. "Wow," said the Wikimedia Foundation, "we could get a million dollars for our charitable and educational site not to be findable in Google! Tell you what, we'll get back to you sometime maybe never. Have you considered an exclusive deal with Conservapedia? They'd fit right in with Fox News. Sorry, did I say that with my outside voice?"
Microsoft is aiming for a direct assault on Google to put pressure on the search engine to start paying for content. "Google's abuse of their position is legendary," said Mr Ballmer. "Ninety-five percent of desktop computers are running Windows, most people are browsing with Internet Explorer and only ten percent of those use our Bob Hope search engine. The only possible explanation is Google abusing its monopoly to make people type 'google.com' into their address bar and not just leave it at the default Microsoft search. The fiends!"
Google did not comment for this story, being too busy snickering and selling installations of Gmail and Google Applications to businesses sick of Office and Windows upgrades.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Too easy, neither are Mensans, to be honest.
What will happen is that people using Google resources to do work, i.e. produce value from a source of raw material, with a definable effort, will simply stop going to Rupert's sources.
As those sources are marginalized, Rupert and Steve will become more strident in their objections to the easy access to information, but that won't stop the slide.
And Fox news (and all of the increasingly inappropriately named "News Corp.") will slide into the abyss of insignificance.
Pretty easy to see that one coming. And as Chromium OS and Android merge, that access will become easier than ever.
davel
dot-sig.
If Google no longer lists the news, I'm gonna go out and buy a newspaper? BULLSHIT!
Newspapers are soon to be rooming with the Steam Engine people and the buggy whip manufacturers. Once they (in large quantity) started telling the customers they thought wrongly, it was on the way over the hill.
And to think anything done on the internet will bring them back is LUDICROUS! Should I believe the world is flat, or Obama is crashing the economy for my benefit?
Bah!
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
If M$ does do this, then I will save me time filtering out Fox News sites while looking for topics. Also gives me the ability to ask "What search do you use?" instead of "What party do you belong to?" I say go for it.
lolz, MS tech (bing) sucks. So what to do? Use money to stifle the leader (google).
Somehow I doubt google is surprised by this activity.
Any youngsters reading, this behavior is similar to how MS killed off Netscape in the 1990s.
They shouldn't wait for News Corp to de index themselves. Google should take the lead and do it themselves. Put up a letter on the front page of Google that says that Rupert Murdoch does not feel that he is getting enough money from Google when Google sends viewers to his websites where they get to see his advertisements and then de-index every single News Corp site.
While they're at it Google should take out a nice short position in News Corp because I'll bet that once those ad revenues go into the toilet News Corp stock won't be looking so good.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
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 work for a NewsCorp subsidy, and I really hope this doesn't happen. This seems even more FUBAR'ed than anti-net-neutrality. The web doesn't work like this, and I hope Rupert wises up.
Google operates as a monopoly. Recently they've been taking it even further... ripping articles from sites and displaying them on their own system, enticing publishers to send their magazines to be scanned in for a dinky cut of CPC.
While I believe news should be freely distributed, "expert" or unique source editorial content needs to fight to control its distribution in this climate.
If a deal like this can get search engines to reevaluate and revalue their right to distribute expert editorial content sources, it will be a good thing for everyone.
It puts an end to a search engine's [google] reign over all Web content (guised as your friendly neighborhood indexer), gives content publishers more power, creates a needed division between professional/expert source content and amateur/personal and helps to balance the distribution of "wealth" regarding the monetization of online content.
So who would lose? Black hat SEO sites predending to be expert sources that simply try to sell consumers on a product that will put them into a reoccurring billing cycle or install malware? Good. Die black hats and slow your role Google.
He isn't dumb, but he knows he is too big to fail. He has many, many employees who would do everything he says to avoid being fired. This means he doesn't care about things I would consider important, like how do I get home ? etc.
For example if I am out of fuel, I would have to walk a long way to the next gas station, while he just calls a security guard and makes him do his bidding.
So he isn't dumb, he has a huge network and the power to influence the masses.
Rosebud
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Did you miss this on the very first page of your link: "Civil Action No. 98-1232 (TPJ)" (emphasis mine).
As Darth would say "All too easy".
I though maybe you misspelled "Elmo". I had to google "emo" to find out what it meant. At my age I'd have to be a major poser to be one. Actually, Sesame Street was after may time as well but I know it from my daughters.
This is awesome! Propaganda machine #1 taking its self out. It's almost like the Titanic met up with the Challenger shuttle and decided to go down together.
It's interesting how suddenly search has become political. On our left, Google, the good, information wants to be free, standing for freedom and liberty, taking on the big evil conglomerates, exploiting their own weaknesses and beating them at their own game. On the right, Murdoch, ultra-orthodox neo-con, wanting to destroy Google and control the world via controlling the media. Microsoft now aligning itself with Murdoch against Google. Therefore, Microsoft now aligning itself with the same right-wing viewpoint of the world, coming to his assistance, helping him conquer.
It's like Star Wars or something, Murdoch as Emperor Palpatine, Balmer as Darth Vader, Google as the resistance...
just wanted to say I will NEVER deliberately use Bing .... still use metacrawler regularly even ....
> These days? How about the last 28+/- years?
Ha ha. Ok. Let me correct that. They're used to be a successful imitator. Now that's an unsuccessful imitator: Whatever Google is doing with 'Live' in front of it. O/S's that have been on a downwards trend since XP. Office has been getting worse since 2000 and help is still so bad I have to use Google to get my Word Help! And now they're trying to bribe people to use their crap products.