Bing considers paying sites to delist themselves from Google

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/microsoft-news-corp-reportedly-consider-web-pact-over-google-2009-11-22

by vaksel • 17 years ago

28 39 17 years ago

alttab• 17 years ago

"I'll pay you not to use the competitor that possibly brings you more than half of your discoveries, new customers, and revenue."

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.

Ixiaus• 17 years ago

I'm not down voting you, it also irritates me. I do have to say though, restriction of content only lasts so long before even the laymen begin to realize their freedoms are suffocated. (slowly boiling the frog)

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).

jerf2• 17 years ago

"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."

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.

cellis• 17 years ago

Tiny nitpick: Microsoft was the 8th most profitable corporation in the world, last year. I am sure there are a lot of products that they sell extremely well, besides Windows / Office.

Also, while they may not have produced many successes over 3 decades of platform wars, they have certainly ruined many competitors.

ZeroGravitas• 17 years ago

Did the Xbox break even? This seems a surprisingly hard question to get a straight answer for.

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.

qeorge• 17 years ago

I think you're being a bit dramatic here. Whats the difference between this and Playstation paying for Grand Theft Auto's exclusivity, or Bing and Google paying for access to Twitter's content while small engines like DuckDuckGo go without? Or the NFL network only allowing coverage of most football games on DirecTV/Dish?

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.

gloob• 17 years ago

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?

chrischen2• 17 years ago

Paying for exclusive content, which other parties did not previously hold the rights to, is constructive manipulation. In this case Microsoft would be paying to detract from Google's value, which is destructive manipulation. In the former case the total output is not lessened, in the latter case the total output is lessened.

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.

brown9-2• 17 years ago

"I'll pay you not to use the competitor that possibly brings you more than half of your discoveries, new customers, and revenue."

Well to be fair, these morons were initially threatening to do remove themselves from Google for free!

dpcan• 17 years ago

It looks to me like a PUBLISHER was quoted as saying "puts enormous value on content if search engines are prepared to pay us to index with them."

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.

dtf• 17 years ago

Metacrawler has been running longer than Google. Strange we could go back to using these kind of search engines.

greyman2• 17 years ago

[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.]

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.

DarkShikari• 17 years ago

They have a full right to ask money for indexing their content.

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.

kwamenum86• 17 years ago

There is no way this could draw another antitrust lawsuit. No way.

jsz0• 17 years ago

What would stop the de-listed sites from appearing in Google search results via syndication/aggregation on blogs and other sites? Seems like they would be putting themselves in a weaker position by letting other sites capture the click-trhough traffic and apply their own spin to the content. In how many cases would the searcher be satisfied with the syndicated/aggregated summary and never click-through? They would have to insist Google de-list sites that link to the content for this to make any sense.

greyman2• 17 years ago

As I understand it, Fox's ultimate goal is not to de-list themselves from the Google, but to force Google to pay them for indexing.

neohacks• 17 years ago

Intresting development. I would have never imagined this happening. In the long run this will impact the profitability of search engines.

oscardelben• 17 years ago

If Microsoft needs to pay user to delete them from google in order to gain new users, how can I think of any quality from them? This sounds more like manipulation to me.

bumblebird• 17 years ago

sounds more like desperation to me.

trafficlight• 17 years ago

Is Microsoft going to drink their own Kool-aid and delist Bing?

javery3• 17 years ago

Is there any reason Google can't just index it anyway?

aristus3• 17 years ago

A copyright lawsuit? Remember that a search engine ultimately functions at the sufferance of copyright owners. If push comes to shove, the engine is obligated to stop storing and serving data they do not own.

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. :)

javery3• 17 years ago

Are you sure that indexing is a copyright violation? You aren't reproducing the text in full and it seems like excerpts would be part of fair use. Do you have a source?

shadow• 17 years ago

So it seems like Bing gotten the idea from Jason Calacanis's How To Kill Google

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

Interesting development indeed.

nazgulnarsil• 17 years ago

http://www.theonion.com/content/video/in_the_know_should_the...

chrischen2• 17 years ago

This isn't going to be good for the end user at all. Right now for the most part search engines can focus on improving results. This will just degrade results by fragmenting them, and detract from efforts to improve results.

If there's any sign that Bing is inferior to Google it's that Bing has to artificially decrease the value of Google.

known• 17 years ago

This is like paying a candidate for not contesting in elections aka pagerank.

anApple• 17 years ago

You can all thank twitter for that. They only give access to their feed to a few selected buddy companies. It was just a matter of time until other sites follow and try to cash out on this!

cabalamat• 17 years ago

Let's say News Corp and Microsoft did this. Let's also assume that News Corp did other things to monetize their data, such as putting it behind a paywall, preventing bloggers from quoting large sections of articles, if the Tories win the British election getting them to shut down the BBC's news website, etc.

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.

ippisl• 17 years ago

Google doesn't even have to build a news research organization. there are enough people who see the opportunity and offer copies of news, and rephrased news, given the ad revenue that would become availble. it just has to make few changes to it's search engines, expose data from their toolbars/queries on popular news articles/subjects , and let the newspapers fight with tons of sites offering their content, or very similar contents for free.

Tichy• 17 years ago

How much money are we even talking about? And I don't mean the offering to Fox, I mean how much money is Google making for searches for Fox news? My guess is that it would be very little money. What searches (besides porn) are the bulk of internet searches?

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.

Gormo• 17 years ago

I wonder if this strategy is really intended to gain a foothold against Google in search, or if they're trying to do something a bit more clever.

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.

robotron• 17 years ago

Google should preemptively stop indexing all News Corp sites.

Bing considers paying sites to delist themselves from Google

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