Bing considers paying sites to delist themselves from Google
marketwatch.com
marketwatch.com
This means publishers appear to be using some leverage with search engines, forcing them into the position of possibly having to purchase the right to index their content.
This is kind-of what Twitter is doing with bing, right? Imagine if WebMD started doing this, followed by others.
We'd have to go to Bing for some content, Google for other content, and there would be a PirateSearchBay that just indexed everything that people would be forced to use.
Yes, that's correct, I think. They (or at least Murdoch) wants to do that. Most of the folks here seems to defend Google, and some of their points are valid, but let's try to look at the issue from the publishers point of view. As it is now, Google just index their content, make a good money out of it, and then give back only a link to that content. And when publisher wants money for the indexing right, Google just says to them: "Shut up, be happy that you've got a free link from us." But... why should the publisher agree with that? They have a full right to ask money for indexing their content.
Now, I think this will be interesting. So far, Internet users have a perception that "there is everything in Google", and it's also Google's core mission, to index all of the worlds information. But it seems everyone just supposed Google should have a right to index everything for free, so now everyone seems surprised that it's not so.
But, it is not Murdoch who drilled a hole to Google's strategy, it was Twitter. Google admitted they are willing to pay for indexing rights, so Murdoch demands the same. I am really curious to see what Google will do about it.
Seriously?
A Dewey Decimal catalogue system should pay money for listing a book?
The White Pages should pay me for including my phone number?
People pay to get entries in the Yellow Pages, not the other way around.
Sounds like a sound business model to me. </sarcasm>
On a more serious note, I'm actually afraid of the collective ignorance of most computer users today that Microsoft could win out with manipulative business practices like this - most internet users are layman and don't understand the integrity issues of whats going on here.
It starts with the developers - we are the ones that create the software that start the market that feed the companies that buy into Microsoft's bull. Vote by code. Stand by it.
Seriously, stories like this make me sick to my stomach. I don't post such bold statements here usually because of the holes that could be punched in my statements by downvoters but there's absolutely no integrity in their business model.
Blech.
While Google is a company that produces a lot of innovative technology, operates a service and infrastructure that is highly useful; I wouldn't consider it strictly necessary.
What is more frightening to me, is the net neutrality war - if Google goes down, the internet remains. If freedom of the internet goes down, a very large portion of the internet will not remain (it could persist through Freenet &c... though).
OK, so let's assume this will work, for this reason, and game it out. I don't hold up the following analysis as Truth, just some thoughts.
In the short term, even for several years, Microsoft could match any revenues to a news company that it chose. In the long term, though, the news company faces two outcomes: Bing essentially succeeds, and Bing essentially fails. In the first case, they essentially win and everything's hunky-dory. In the second case, they lose any independent market existence they have and become a Microsoft vassal, dependent on the Microsoft payoff to survive on the net.
So, taking this offer from Microsoft is effectively betting that Microsoft can successfully dethrone Google and beat them at their core competency. As a person interested in the software industry who has watched Microsoft thrash around in numerous fields over the past couple of decades, and scoring only one modest success outside of Windows and Office in that time frame (the games division, which still isn't in the Office/Windows league by any means), this is not a bet I'd care to make. I have no idea how a news company would see this, though.
(BTW, I'm judging "success" by "profit". Very few things at Microsoft make money. I believe the XBox division did finally break even fairly recently, and that makes them a rarity, and I could be misremembering.)
It seems to me it's going to be hard to convince a company to be the first to jump ship. "Hard" here of course mostly means "will take more money", but still, to pull this off successfully it seems like Microsoft will need to get not just one news organization, but several, and match it up with a very big, very expensive advertising campaign to boot.
It might work... but it seems to me it's more like a "Hail Mary" than a sound plan. But Hail Marys do sometimes work; I'm not saying it's impossible.
Also, while they may not have produced many successes over 3 decades of platform wars, they have certainly ruined many competitors.
Other things may "sell" well, but nothing else makes money.
That's how profitable Office and Windows are.
Incidentally, if you've ever wondered why Microsoft is so willing to go to bat for Windows or Office lockin, this is why. They are a mighty edifice built on two things, and if either one of them fails they are in for a world of hurt. This does put them ahead of Google, though, which is a mighty edifice built on one thing, ads.
This probably also explains why Microsoft might be willing to pump a lot of money into this task; cutting off Google's traffic cuts off their ads, which cuts off their Windows quasi-replacement (their new OS stuff) and their Office replacement (Google Docs). If Google was just sitting there, raking in dough from online ads, but had no OS or Google Docs, Microsoft would probably be content to just watch them, but Google really is a huge existential threat to Microsoft, who really is in a much more insecure position than it may seem if you just read the bottom line on the balance sheet.
There's regularly stories about it being "profitable" but they generally mean that they stopped making a yearly loss. Seldom, if ever, do they ask if and when the cumulative yearly profits gave a suitable Return on Investment.
I'm not judging the business model's merits, but selling exclusive access to content is nothing new.
"It starts with the developers - we are the ones that create the software that start the market that feed the companies that buy into Microsoft's bull. Vote by code. Stand by it."
You're confusing Microsoft the software company with Microsoft the advertising company. This has absolutely nothing to do with developers.
I'm not judging the business model's merits, but selling exclusive access to content is nothing new.
I'm coming at this from a completely different angle, which is entirely unfair (:P), but the big difference is that moving a closed-source, inherently-system-dependent piece of software onto another system against the will of the original developers is notably non-trivial, while ignoring a robots.txt file is a fairly straightforward exercise.
If this would-be "exclusivity" comes to pass, it won't last for very long. Even if above-board companies like Microsoft and Google continue to play by the nominal rules, something vaguely similar to the Pirate Bay is bound to pop up eventually, especially when such a massive, glaring hole in the market is present. I mean, what good is a search engine that doesn't even search properly?
Either way, the majority of all new traffic comes from Google right now, and if a website has exclusivity for Bing, it would surely lose a lot visits. And it's definitely not worth it unless Microsoft pays really well for this privilege ... and I'm not sure they can do that, even if they are Microsoft.
Ideally there would be no manipulative tactics at all, and all competing entities would do so by merit and product improvement alone. In this case all possible actions would be additive to total output.
Microsoft's tactics of destructive manipulation however is the worst you can get.
Well to be fair, these morons were initially threatening to do remove themselves from Google for free!
Google is the number one search engine, but grew into that position while the web was growing, during a period when people went "on the internet" to find information, rather than to any specific site, and a substantial proportion of users were new to the internet altogether.
Now that the web has reached a higher level of maturity and become a tool of mainstream, day-to-day life, people have begun to view many sites as destinations in themselves.
Look at sites like Wikipedia, eBay, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc. They are very collaborative, and function like platforms, but unlike Google's core business, people visit these sites specifically because of the content they host, rather than as a means to explore the wider internet. Add to that the increasing presence of traditional media content, e.g. Hulu, that have been able to leverage conventional marketing to drive users to their sites.
Most of these sites are likely no longer heavily dependent on search to attract users. These sites may be willing to delist from Google in exchange for a direct revenue stream. If they do, it will diminish the value of not just Google, but of web search in general.
This may be a strategy to fragment search as a primary driver of web traffic, and create an incumbent advantage for content providers and web services with high traditional brand awareness, such as its own, at the expense of startups which continue to rely on search to build their user base.
I think this could be an enormous opportunity for Google. They could create their own news service (or maybe buy one). They could integrate it with Google Ads, Reader, allow commenting social bookmarking, etc done in an open way to get as much external take-up of the information as possible, and maybe integrate it with Google Maps so that people could have a personalised local news service.
The cost of this? BBC News has an annual budget of £350 million, so something in that area.
If a lot of Google's competitors are voluntarily de-listing themseves from the open internet, everyone would flock to Google's option.
If there's any sign that Bing is inferior to Google it's that Bing has to artificially decrease the value of Google.
When Google was ascendant, the threat of a delist was enough to cow copyright owners into submission (see: news orgs vs Google News, Belgium vs Google, etc). Now, well, who knows?
That said I think this is a greedy and dangerous move on Microsoft's part, and I'm sure this is what Murdoch was alluding to a couple of weeks ago. This could kill the spirit of 'net neutrality for good if they simply move the battle to different layer of the stack.
On the other hand, I like writing metasearchers, so it might be a net win for me. :)
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2005/09/68928
http://cci.edu.au/publications/search-engine-liability-copyr...
Parker v Yahoo takes the view that putting content online is implicitly allowing indexing. By the same logic, explicitly blocking an engine would mean the opposite.
http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2008/10/search_engine_c...
The second one includes some great information, but if you read about the specific cases (starting on page 6) you can see it is still very much up for debate. Actually it seems that the courts have ruled in Google's favor almost every time, and most of these are for caching and not indexing.
If a site really really wants to block a particular engine run by a for-profit company, or make it impractical (either legally or technically) they can.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTe15DEWp30
Interesting development indeed.
I don't think I have ever hit on a Fox web site in a web search, but then I am not living in the US.