How Bing could kill Google | Hacker News Reader

How Bing could kill Google

calacanis.com

47 pointsjlees54 comments

I think this is missing the point, which is that the new generation doesn't care about ink and paper news. There are some out there that seem to believe that people will "miss" outlets such as the NYTimes and WSJ, but I don't think that they will. All that really matters to people is getting relevant information and opinions about current events.

Part of me thinks that most of the people defending ink and paper are doing so purely for sentimental reasons. Citizen journalists have proven time and time again that they can stand up to the plate and deliver interesting content.

As I understood the article, is not about ink and paper. The suggestion was, that Bing will pay NYTimes and WSJ to index their content, if/when will they go out of Google index - the intention behind is, that if people want to have those sites in the search results, they will have go to Bing.

Smart people get their news from aggregators and feeds. Normal people go to sites directly for their daily dosage of drivel. Both Google search for individual stories. It just so happens that the same news story is linked 10 times down the page, some often pointing to the same page due to blogs and aggregators.

I predict nothing consequential will come of this drama.

I don't think the post was about ink and paper, it was not even about news. It's was about the increasing influence of content owners and commoditization of aggregators and search engines. Finishing his sentence one could say that nothing stops Bing from going after top 500 bloggers and essentially offering them cash to opt out of Google index.

It can actually work: while the Internet is huge, the 80/20 principle still applies - 80% of the population are interested in 20% of the content. I bet that pulling just top 20 NFL/NCAA sites and blogs out of Google will noticeably boost Bing's audience. Heck, maybe even getting exclusive rights to index Wikipedia may do the trick.

Alternatively, strategies like this could segregate users on search. Football and Nascar on bing and an entire class of citizens have left Google. Makes me think of Myspace and Facebook.

The real question is how much would of a deal would you have to give WSJ to convince them to leave all of google's eyeballs behind? A bigger cut of a smaller pie is not necessarily a better deal.

Well, maybe. Actually I probably agree. But here is the test.

If "real news" disappears from Google, will people switch to Bing. Bing works too. If it bothers people at all, they might switch.

No speculation about what the new generation cares about necessary. Trial by fire.

Yeah...so on day 1, Bing goes after a bunch of exclusive indexing deals, and on day 2, Google does the same. Assuming you're a content provider who is willing to do a deal like this, and you're going to get roughly the same amount of money, who are you going to go with? Probably the guy who has 70% of the market. This seems like a quick way to get Google's market share to 80%.

But the next question is: Who has the deeper pockets with which to throw more money to the content providers?

In Microsoft v. Google? They'll both run out of upside long before they run out of money, that is to say, both can spend amounts of money unbounded by the actual quantity they have as other bounds kick in first.

Just looked up the latest balance sheets. GOOG has $12 billion in cash, MSFT $6 billion. And GOOG had positive cash flow in their last quarterly, MSFT was negative.

One upside in that scenario might be making it more likely that Google would face antitrust proceedings :)

I have a lot of respect for Jason and takes his opinion more serious than mine.

In this case I think he is misunderstanding the Internet a little bit. The value is not created in the center (content, sites) but by the nodes. We, the users create the value of the internet and to some extent the value of what you search, at least that part is growing.

If you look at the top 20 sites on alexa globally you wont find a single pure news-site. You'll find a combination of social sites, collaborative sites, self-publishing and communication sites. This, this is the value of the internet - it's not "content".

This, this is the value of the internet - it's not "content".

I'd agree that's where the value is, but the money is all with the content (regardless whether that content is aggregated from users or produced in-house).

Sounds like a great opportunity for someone to SEO optimize a site, paraphrase WSJ articles, put some ads in and let Google index them (like already happens to dozens of blogs). Then instead of blaming Google for stealing their money, News Corp will have to blame the dozens (hundreds?) of spammy reposters who appear to fill the void.

But at least, they will get some money from Microsoft.

News Corp would be able to go after these people with copyright infringement lawsuits, possibly naming Google as a co-defendant. Stopping this kind of infringement is a much more manageable task than stopping P2P file sharing, as these sites are dependent on Google/some other ad network making payments to them.

I remember there was this company that had exclusive deals with content providers, in the early Web days. Oh - AOL - that was it. In fact I think I still have one of their CDs lying around somewhere.

I remember Scientific American being behind the AOL-wall, and thinking damn, SA should really be out here with everything else. But I also remember thinking there's no way I'm going to pay AOL for anything when there's so much else out here beyond the walls. And that was in the early Web days.

Today I can't believe that anyone would disassociate themselves from the World Wide Web, when virtually every potentially walled-off property has fistfuls of just as good competition out here.

Maybe with Bing it won't matter so much, as any browser can display results from multiple engines with the right add-on, or anyone can provide a web-app to do so. So the only people who will care about how this plays out is MS and Google; the rest of us will continue to just search and consume.

Murdoch's flirtation with building a giant tree-fort (NO GURLZ ALOWD!) will probably end up being an example of a doomed Maginot Line. "Rumble-rumble-rumble ... What's this? (It's a pay-wall, sir) Well, drive around it!"

I think, though, the most comprehensive attempt at re-enacting AOL is FaceBook. Sure, lots of people are in FaceBook, just like all our grandparents were. But there's still a lot of people outside of FaceBook, and anyone selling or renting content inside FaceBook isn't reaching any of those outsiders. And there's plenty outside the FaceBook wall to keep people busy and happy and informed (and blissfully un-poked).

Every single WSJ article I have read over the last year has been a referral from news.ycombinator.com.

Now maybe people are Googling for those articles but I think what is going to happen is that the browser will end up aggregating the search across a variety of platforms.

Perhaps news sources, search, and browsers are organiztiong into a vertical market.

With all due respect to Jason Calacanis, he has made his selling Weblogs to AOL...I get that. However, I honestly think that he doesn't understand the way media is changing. It's not about the 'few' large content creators anymore - it's about the millions of little content creators. The search engine business has not been commodotized, the content business has.

Sharing revenue with 'certain' content creators doesn't scale like paying the top digg users to submit content on Netscape doesn't scale.

I am not one of those that thinks that paper and ink will go away, I just think that the model is going to change drastically.

Weren't the lawsuits and withholding of 'professional content' from YouTube supposed to kill YouTube some years ago? What happened to that? Yes, Hulu is a nice destination, but wasn't that also supposed to 'kill Google'? Whenever I see Mark Cuban agreeing with Calacanis on some crazy tirade (http://blogmaverick.com/2009/11/09/rupert-murdoch-to-block-g...) it really gives me pause. No offense to Mr. Cuban either.

Twitter & Facebook have not, and WILL NOT replace Google. It's that simple. Yes, they might perform some functions better than Google, but there are two different use cases for both sets of services. When I want to find general information about a topic (anything outside of 'real-time' info and my social graph) I go to Google first. Twitter and Facebook won't change that, because they are not even in that game.

Bing, on the other hand, is finally gaining ground and that's good. Competition is a good thing for the markets and is very healthy. Someone needs to keep Google in check.

This notion of throwing money at content providers/creators under the presumption that their content is what most of Google's traffic is in search for is a misguided notion.

I don't profess to know what (if anything) will kill Google, but I would recommend that Calacanis and Cuban go read 'The Long Tail' again. That is the future. As 37signals puts it, the Fortune 5,000,000 not Fortune 100.

There was a recent Sky News interview with Murdoch on YouTube, very good and I agree that the content business has been commoditized.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7GkJqRv3BI

Come to think of it, News Corp can put out good content and people will pay for it: but it's a downhill route in the broadest sense -- so long as their are content "selectors" - those that try to undercut News Corp will succeed if such selectors are pushing free content out well via Twitter. Free Writers and Free Selectors - and making their lives better - are the future.

If this actually happened with key web properties (e.g. ALL NewsCorp papers, or Twitter, or NASCAR/NFL/etc exclusively on one search engine), I predict it would turn into a land grab which would ultimately just lead to segregation. However, the key question in my mind is:

Would users follow the sites they trust OR find new sites via the search engine they trust?

I'm guessing people would use the search engine they trust to source new information and then visit the sites they love (which have been excluded from their search) as a destination (i.e. going to WSJ.com direct and then searching content there)...

Google would still remain the No 1 search engine but WSJ etc would then have to rely more on their active user base. Not a smart decision for Mr Murdoch in my opinion.

I'm not sure if this is how Bing will kill Google, but I do think Bing is going to slowly take a lot of market share away from Google. How? Niche specific search customization.

For a while now I've been bugged by how searching anything on Google is done with nothing but one text box. There's no customization. You can't tailor your search or refine it based on values and properties specific to your categorical search. I think Bing recognizes that and is gunning in that direction. Their restaurant finder lets you filter out restaurants with dim lighting, for instance. You can't do that with Google. And if Bing keeps adding various categories to their search, I'm willing to bet that it'll be a lot more useful than Google.

"You can't tailor your search or refine it based on values and properties specific to your categorical search."

It's a nice idea but to be honest this is out of reach for 98% of internet users. I've probably explained to my mom what a blog is half a dozen times and still doesn't get it. She also refuses to stop double clicking on links...

A search engine for savvy people would also not be a great business position because those type of people don't click on ads. There was an article last week on Hacker News that 8% of internet users account for 85% of all clicks.

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArtic...

Judging by the number of blogs and people on Twitter, your mom is probably no longer the typical internet user. Or at least there's enough savvy folks to be a sizable marketing opportunity.

Judging by the number of blogs and people on Twitter, your mom is probably no longer the typical internet user.

For those of us who travel in tech savvy circles, I think it's all too easy to forget that his mom absolutely is the typical Internet user, as depressing as I sometimes find that prospect.

Or at least there's enough savvy folks to be a sizable marketing opportunity.

I'm not disagreeing with that, but don't think for a second that the majority have any real idea what these Interwebs are all about.

Have you seen google squared? It sounds like a step in the direction you're after, although it's far from perfect.

I think "b) If you would only search the top 1,000 newspapers and magazines on Bing, would you use it? How often?" is fairly crucial. I can't imagine my life would be any different if I couldn't search the WSJ on Google. But then I'm not the sort of person for whom WSJ pages as search results factor highly.

Jason's proposed deal certainly does provide a rescue option for Murdoch's terrible statement about taking all his content off Google - but it just opens up a need for someone to register bingle.com and simply aggregate both sets of search results together. Search should be open, not partisan; hiding content from Google and publishing it on Bing won't gain Bing market share, it'll just reduce the WSJ's hits.

Do people actually want quality? I don't think so. I think they want humor, personalities, different perspectives, social integration, and probably most importantly they want some blogger to read an 8 page article and summarize it into 2 or 3 paragraphs for them. Turning Bing into the news stand doesn't address the reality that people's conduits for information have fundamentally changed. I don't think there's anyway to go back at this point. Additionally I have a hard time believing 1000 major publications would get into bed with Microsoft on this. It's too risky and Microsoft's track record on the web is comically bad. They could get maybe a few dozen maybe. Would anyone miss them?

Agreed! I love the fact that blogs take on a personality and have an opinion and/or attitude. More exciting then reading "unbiased" newspaper articles.

The title of this article should be "How Bing could speed up the stagnant decline of Microsoft"

It's a shame you got down-voted due to snark, but you're spot-on.

MSM newspapers don't pull enough weight on the Internet for them to play the "take my ball and go home" card. Personally, the only newspaper I'd be disappointed to see leave Google's index is the New York Times, but not even that would force me to switch to Bing.

If your killer-feature is the indexing of a crusty, dying industry that fewer and fewer people see value in, you're not going to overtake a competitor that holds 70% of the market.

How long would it be before Google gets into this game as well?

And how long before fragmenting search results across multiple search engines leads to a thriving new market of news sources that don't sign exclusive distribution deals?

He mentioned (in the video of this at least) that it could be used as a bargaining chip to Google which makes a lot of sense, so I suspect Google will immediately be part of the game.

I doubt it somewhat - Google isn't the kind of company that likes to be in the position of dependence on anybody else.

It would be bad thing if competition in this area devolves into this sort of conspiratorial atmosphere. While competition is great to have as it pushes positive change and innovation, it is worrying in this instance for its ability to degrade the usefulness of search engines.

This strategy does not benefit end users. Therefore, end users should avoid it.

Fountain of youth for 2 dinosaurs, I say.

Microsoft could lose relevancy if it doesn't gain a foot hold in the "markets of the future."

We are all familiar with the woes of the publishing industry.

The press could form an exclusive partnership with Microsoft to take down Google.

I wonder how risky this is considering you would still have indirect links to the publishers' content via, for example, blog posts or sites like Hacker News where there is meta-discussion of the content of those sites going on.

Normally I agree with most of Jason's ideas, except on this one.

While, I agree old media needs to reexamine their business models, leaving the google index is a temporary band-aid, that does not solve the real problem. Murdoch, should focus on creating more value for his products. Paywalls, make sense when enough value is created, justifying the subscription cost.

In my eyes this is good news for entrepreneurs, its a lot easier to innovate when the giant is distracted trying to revive its old biz model.

This is an interesting idea. I think it has more chance of sinking Rupert then hurting Google at all, but I wouldn't say wouldn't certainty that it can't work. Maybe Google can be made to pay too, a precedent.

An extremely interesting consequence of success would be setting a price for indexing content. It wouldn't be a perfect price, but it would be a price.

*I think this is argued better in the video. It mentions Google paying for access to the Twitter feed, paying ofr content to index.

Would this affect Google News? I don't think I'd miss search results without certain news publications, but it would water down my primary input for news.

This might work if Murdoch wasn't saying that he's not at all interested in being indexed, but in serving paying subscribers. Calacanis missed Murdoch's motive for opting out of Google: Not because Google's specifically a bad place to get traffic, but because Murdoch doesn't understand the benefits of search traffic enough to find a more appropriate solution.

This is the same strategy that Sirius used when they tried to 'break' normal radio by signing Howard Stern.

That deal seems to have worked out pretty well for Stern, but was a disaster for Sirius. It might work just as well for Bing!

Looking at one example, the one that favors your opinion is useless. Yes, sometime this works, sometimes it doesn't.

This is a smart move. If news starts disappearing from Google, why would people use it at all! And, the fact that Google supports "opt-out", makes this all the more easy!

People would use it because it is an amazing search engine.

I never use google for news, and I will use google even if bing pulls this little(big) stunt.

Enough of this nonsense already, please.

robots.txt as ransom note

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTe15DEWp30

Zombie Bing Crosby crawls out of his grave and eats the brains of Google engineers.

It seems as if it pays to be evil.

Except exclusive content deals could be viewed as Microsoft using its leverage in an existing monopoly to unfairly compete in the search engine space.

> using its leverage

What leverage would they be using to get a content deal?

The leverage of having tons of money obtained from their monopolies. For Microsoft to "offer more revenue" they would have to pay the money straight out of their own coffers. It's unlikely their non-monopoly divisions (which are barely profitable) could support such a scheme.

Well, I'm sure they can do some damage and slowly kill off Google engineers with their awesome jingle: http://www.bing.com/community/blogs/search/archive/2009/08/0...

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