For the past few weeks, Murdoch and his officers at News Corp. have been very vocal about their distaste for Google and their desire to lead a mass boycott against the search giant.
Rupert Murdoch is such a tool, he keeps threatening block Google from indexing the WSJ.com and his vast network of media sites. He also feels that other news organizations join him. Whats worse? That Microsoft’s Bing team think this is just a grand idea. Reports that Microsoft has entered negotiations with News Corp. and other publishers about the possibility of paying them to remove their sites from Google’s search index.
Apparently Microsoft is not afraid to buy search market share, something akin to what it’s doing with the Yahoo deal. Or its Cashback program. With with these latest statements, they appear to be trying to buy the news, exclusive access news.
However there is an inherent problem with this. Bing can’t buy all the news, the deal with Murdoch would only a few brands. Bing could somehow become the only search engine you could find news results with links to the Wall Street Journal and other News Corp. content such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the LA Times might just get people to switch search engines.
What’s not clear is how much it would cost Bing for the news companies of the world to give up all the search traffic Google sends in return for a smaller percentage of traffic and some cash from Bing.
Herein lies Bing’s problem with this approach; in order to actually make an impact on Google’s dominant market share, Bing would be required to pay ridiculous sums to a vast amount of different news outlets. They could never recoup that investment.
The biggest problem with search engines buying market share. By taking parts of the news is due to the fact that information so rapidly, exclusivity last less than 30 seconds. What was your exclusive will end up on some other site that IS indexed by Google.
Exclusivity goes against the Web’s inherent openness. Web pioneers do not try to curtail that, if they do they don’t last long