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.'"
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
The children are right to mock you AC. Google honors robots.txt, if a news outlet doesn't want their site indexed, all they need to do is put a deny rule in it.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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.
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.
[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.
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.
I remember reading that what Rupert Murdoch actually wants is headlines to be trawled as currently done, but for actual news items to be paid for. He wants Google to check the story for relevance but not display it; Just a link to the place where you pay for / subscribe to the article.
Needless to say, Google said "It doesn't work like that."
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
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 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
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.
"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!
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.
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.
...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."
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
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
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.
Here in Australia Murdoch prints the trashier newspapers anyway. If you want good news stories, these are not the newspapers to read. They are designed in general to appeal to the less educated with stacks of sex, sensationalism and sport. Quite frankly if they were cut out of google search responses it would make my searches for decent news reports faster and easier. Wherever I go in Australia, I don't read his newspapers anyway (but I'll pinch the cryptic crosswords if anyone else is reading them...)
sudo mount --milk --sugar
If anything, this one is a killer deal!
You know what would be funny? Google should remove all of murdoch's news sites from the index and say "We took the liberty of removing the sites, like you've been publicly talking about". If he wants them back he'll have to publicly ask to be reincluded. That should make his intentions clearer.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
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..
I remember reading that what Rupert Murdoch actually wants is headlines to be trawled as currently done, but for actual news items to be paid for. He wants Google to check the story for relevance but not display it; Just a link to the place where you pay for / subscribe to the article. Needless to say, Google said "It doesn't work like that."
Interesting. Google could simply not index any NewsCorp sites and let MS pour money into Murdoch's pockets till it gets tired and stops. Depending on how long that takes and the success of Bing vs Google to capture market share, News Corp may find that many people no longer think of their papers when looking for news, especially if viable alternatives establish stronger online presences.
Google can check and see what percentages of searches involve News Corp sites, click through rates, etc., an dteh decide on the impact of barNews Corp may be betting Google folds, but Google has pretty good idea of who holds what cards.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
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?
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.
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 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.)
the dinosaur is sensing his extinction
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
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.
No, I'm pretty sure that with expert sex change (I'm going to call it that because it seems to have little to do with experts exchanging info unless your definition of "experts" is "non-experts" and your definition of "exchange" is "lock up behind a paywall"), you have to view source, THEN scroll down.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Experts!
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.
I HATE experts exchange. I program for a living and often when I come across odd bugs I'll do a quick google to see if someone else has had the same problem. Sure enough, experts exchange ranks near the top. You can actually see what the 'expert' answer is by scrolling right to the bottom of the page (I was told google threatened to take them off their search if they didn't have the answer) but now that I can see the answer, it's still usually complete rubbish. If I could define a search profile, that crap ass site would sure as hell be in the hide list.
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.
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.
But I'm grateful to experts exchange for at least one laugh. Hint: the hyphen in their domain name appeared some relatively long time after site launched.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
He does put a robots.txt file in his sites. See for example
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/robots.txt
http://www.thesun.co.uk/robots.txt
He's put loads of crawlers on it. Googlebot isn't one of them, because he presumably is happy for it to visit.
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.
In Britain, The Sun and News of the World are about as trashy as it gets, although there is the Daily Star and the Daily Sport if that's too upmarket for you. The Times however is a pretty decent paper, although there is the Telegraph, Independent and Guardian if he starts charging for it. It is not as good as the Financial Times which already has a successful pay model in place.
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
he already uses a robots.txt file,
User-agent: * /printer_friendly_story /projects/livestream
Disallow:
Disallow:
#
Sitemap: http://www.foxnews.com/google_news_news.xml
Sitemap: http://www.foxnews.com/google_news_entertainment.xml
Sitemap: http://www.foxnews.com/google_news_opinion.xml
Sitemap: http://www.foxnews.com/google_news_politics.xml
Sitemap: http://www.foxnews.com/google_search_news.xml
Sitemap: http://www.foxnews.com/google_search_entertainment.xml
Sitemap: http://www.foxnews.com/google_search_opinion.xml
Sitemap: http://www.foxnews.com/google_search_politics.xml
Sitemap: http://www.foxnews.com/google_search_sections.xml
That's what robots.txt is for - Google really don't care if you want to use them or not, but they respect anyone who wants to opt out using an industry standard. Good luck being the person to explain to your boss why 83% of your market can't even see you online any more, though. It's like "opting-out" of advertising for free on 83% of all billboards in the city you're advertising in... nobody's stopping you, and nobody can blame the biggest billboard company in the world if you can't get enough people interested in your product when you only advertise on the other 17%.
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.
If Google removed Murdoch's news sites from it's index for something that's not a violation of terms, they'd likely be sued for doing it - for doing his business irreparable harm, just like any other business would that's vying for placement in their index. No, I'm not joking.
I am not a Fox News watcher but the hate seems to be more an act than anything so let's just get past that.
Can this work? Well how will most people know that when they Google it that they will not find Fox news or the other properties that Murdock owns? Of those how many will go to Bing or Yahoo which is now powered by Bing to search for it?
That is the question. Will the money the get make up for the lack of traffic? Will this drive enough traffic to Bing to make it worth while?
Actually I heard Bing is a good search engine but I am just too invested in Google for email and search to really bother with it. I still use a my Yahoo home page because I feel it is better than Google,s custom page but that is just a matter of taste. Too be honest this doesn't make me want to use Bing more but actually less. Not from any Fox New hate but because it seems like cheating to me.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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.
I dont think paying people to block google is a winning strategy, but lets say that Microsoft had an unlimited amount of money to devote to killing off google's search business. How many sites would have to be removed from google before people would actually stop using it?
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
The first one hides links to Expert Sexchange from your Google search results (unfortunately, it still shows the text, it just hides the link. Someone with better CSS-fu than me can probably tell you how to hide the entire li. The second line puts a big red [IDIOT WARNING] after any link to Expert Sexchange that you might come across by accident. I have a few of these that stop me accidentally visiting sites like MySpace, Information Week, or Roughly Drafted.
I also add a line like this for sites with irritating ads, to prevent me from accidentally visiting them again. I prefer this to ad blocking; if the ads are too irritating for me to want to the site, I'd rather just not visit them.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Yeah, I think he's a greedy jack***
Normally I'm against this sort of self-censorship, but I agree that "Thompson" is an incredibly vulgar word nobody here wants to hear!
At first I thought you meant "jackass" but there's nothing vulgar about donkeys.
Free Martian Whores!
The OptimizeGoogle add-on for Firefox has, among many other useful features, a filter function that lets you remove unwanted websites from Google search results. I recommend it.
As for experts-exchange, I share your disgust. Their business model is an abomination. Sometimes, however, I find the solutions posted there by poor ignorant souls useful. As long as you block their cookies you can see all the answers without registering simply by jumping to the bottom of their pages. Use AdBlock to make sure they don't get any ad revenue from your page views. This way you benefit from them and help to accelerate their death at the same time. It's a clear win-win!
most of what follows is true
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.
My ass. If I have one of those maps covered in local businesses and I take yours off, you can't sue me. Google would laugh them out of court.
If Google were to stop dealing with the web entirely and start making buttscratchers, could people sue for (literally) the trillions of dollars it would cost them? I don't think so. Google has no obligation to them, or anybody but its shareholders (of which its founders are IIRC a majority).
You might not be joking - News Corp might very well sue - but the suit would absolutely fail.
That's completely disregarding that Google would only be complying with Murdoch's stated wishes.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
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.
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
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?
Ok, now go read the history of *any* tribal society. You'll invariably find they either raided, murdered and raped and were glorified by history, or were raided, murdered and raped - and surviving histories paint them as savages.
The more effective the murdering rapist, the bigger his cult of personality. Whatever society evolves from this primitive state is guaranteed to show undue deference to their forebears. Ask a Italian what they think of Cesar, a Macedonian what they think of Alexander, a Frank what they think of Charlemagne, a Swede what they think about Eric the Red, a Jew what they think of Joshua, a Mongol what they think of Genghis Khan etc. etc. etc.
It's as much time for the Muslims to take responsibility for their (father's) actions as it is all of humanity. By your standards, not only have we all blood on our hands, we glorify it.
Ready for a shocker? It continues TODAY. There isn't an active army in the field who hasn't killed and raped it's opponents. Usually not to the same scale as in history, but not always - notice in those exceptions, it was Muslims who were raped and murdered.
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
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.