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Murdoch-Microsoft Deal In the Works
Hugh Pickens writes "The Financial Times reports that Microsoft is in discussions to pay Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, owner of newspapers ranging from the Wall Street Journal of the US to The Sun of the UK, to 'de-index' its news websites from Google, setting the scene for a search engine battle that could offer a ray of light to the newspaper industry. Microsoft is desperate to catch Google in search, and, after five years and hundreds of millions of dollars of losses, Bing, launched in June, marks its most ambitious attempt yet. Microsoft's interest is being interpreted as a direct assault on Google because it puts pressure on the search engine to start paying for content. 'This is all about Microsoft hurting Google's margins,' said the web publisher who is familiar with the plan. 'It's easy to believe that [Microsoft] may spew senseless riches into publishers' pockets, radically distorting the news market, just to spite Google,' writes Rob Beschizza at BoingBoing. 'Murdoch could be wringing cash out of a market he knows is doomed to implosion or assimilation. And he doesn't even have to be an evil genius, either; he just has to be smarter than Steve Ballmer.'"
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.
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
Now if the big news sites suddenly drop from Google but can be found via Bing, people are going to change there.
The interesting question is: Are people going to change search engine - or news site?
Since most news sites these days essentially publish press releases and agency reports verbatim, there isn't much difference between them anyways. I'm pretty sure a lot of people wouldn't even notice. My vote is that they'll stay with the search engine and just read the same news story at a different news site.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I think you've made an error here:
But truth is, it's a lot easier to find the news you're looking for from search engine. If you spot theres a news site you think is good quality, then you go to it. Now if the big news sites suddenly drop from Google but can be found via Bing, people are going to change there.
Current search engine users are almost exclusively Google users. If people almost exclusively get their news by searching, they have no site loyalty and almost exclusively get their news from whatever sites Google sends them, and therefore when the news sites drop off Google, they will stop visiting those sites. The people who visit the news sites directly or by syndication will not even notice the transition.
Only the subset of users who are loyal to a news site, and only reach it via Google searches, and who figure out why they can't find it on Google any more, will switch to Bing.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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.
1. So why doesn't Murdoch just put a robots.txt file in his sites? It's because he WANTS them to be indexed ... but he also wants to get $$$ for it.
2. So his sites will appear on bing and not google? Sounds like the quality of google searches just went up.
3. I'm sure the sites that will replace NewsCorp properties in the searches can't believe that Christmas came early.
As long as Bing keeps sorting the results based on the website's popularity rather than the page's relevance I don't see myself ever using Bing.
Well, if it's the former, Google has its own "Do no evil" thing that they're supposed to abide by.
This whole story irritates me. Microsoft is employing the whole, "If you can't beat them, find some way to leverage your stockpiles of cash to manipulate the market." If Bing really is a better search engine, people will start using it. Let it compete on its merits.
He doesn't want to change robots.txt.
He wants to change laws and get the blessing of governments to fence off the internet and make money out of it. That is why there have been a lot of speeches and a lot of noise and the implication that we are all a pile a leeches.
It may look like an ignorant bull in a china shop but that isn't what is happening. He knows what he's doing, he's just prepared to break all the rules and turn the net into a virtually worthless thing in comparison to what it is now so long as he is making more money out of it that he is now.
I personally have no interest in Murdoch's news sites and I would pay to have an index that excluded all of his publications. They are either sensationalist trash or blatantly biased news sources.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
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
It may be different in other countries but in the USA and the UK, the act of linking itself is not a problem. There might be cases where it is, e.g. if you say "the following people are peadophiles" and then link to a list of home sites, but these are all as relevant to the legality of linking itself as the illegality of murdering someone with a hammer is to the legality of hammers.
Now if you're doing other things, such as caching the sites content and perhaps displaying it in a different format, then things become more confused. Google displaying the first few lines of a search result? Fair use in the USA. The UK doesn't have "fair use" as such, but I doubt a case would get very far and, more to the point, no-one would bother bringing such a case. The thing is, it's pretty easy to add a robots.txt file to your site and Google respects these. Laws would only have to made to deal with this area of technology if it were onerous or in dispute - e.g. a site owner has to keep track of hundreds of different "don'tcrawlmebro" files, or they're horribly complicated, or Google or Bing or whoever refuses to respect them or caches more than site owners feel is fair.
At present, things are working nicely so there hasn't been much impetus to create laws dealing with this area. Murdoch would be happy to bury this area in laws, of course. His interest is against an open commons and in favour of a model that involves lawyers and money. He has lots of both, you see. The threat to him is not his business rivals stealing his customers, but his customers no longer needing him.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
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?"
I agree completely and I wonder why this is not considered an antitrust issue. I thought this behavior is basically the definition of antitrust; Using your monopoly in one market to force out competition in another market. Between paying off Murdoch *and* setting Bing as the default search engine in MS products, is this not illegal monopoly behavior?
Microsoft is going to kill Google the way they killed Netscape.
That reminds me of a kid claiming he's going to kill a bear with a bb gun. Google is not Netscape.
This move would be bad for MSFT and bad for News Corp, which means I'm not seeing a downside. If MSFT was smart, they would pass on this deal.
The next thing Murdoch would come out with is the News Corp search engine.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I'm not sure that Fox News or the rest of Newscorp actually caries any information that the other western news networks omit. It's all homogeneous. The only distinction between Newscorp's output and everyone else's is that it's pre-digested into a commentary-heavy form of "news entertainment".
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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.
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