Just Search | Search Engine Optimisation & Internet Marketing
Just Search | Search Engine Optimisation & Internet Marketing
Reported in the news today is the possibility that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, one of the largest publishers of content on the web, is in talks with Microsoft over the prospect of their new search engine Bing becoming the only search engine able to crawl Rupert Murdoch’s sites.
If the plan goes ahead, it would mean that Google would be banned and blocked from spidering content (at least without paying for it), and all existing Rupert Murdoch content would be “de-indexed”.
Microsoft have spent hundreds of millions of pounds launching Bing, and with just under 10 percent of the search market, Bing is struggling to make much of an impact with online searchers. Therefore, it is no surprise they are doing everything they can to try and damage Google’s margins.
The newspapers have yet to find a reliable way of making money from their own content, while hard-copy newspaper sales are decreasing at an alarming rate and so they are understandably interested in the outcome of the Murdoch-Bing deal.
Although it’s a bold move from Microsoft, it is quite clear, to me at least, that this would be very disruptive to the Internet as a whole. Once one publisher makes a decision like this, it is very likely others will follow. Microsoft has already approached other large publishers about removing their content from Google.
Despite this, there won’t be much to stop Google from caching duplicates of the original articles. Blog posts containing the same content scraped from these original sites, for example, will be very difficult to stop.
Simon Davies
SEO Programmer
that is bold news! very interesting to find out that Rupert Murdock is up to some corrupt and disjointed plan to take over the internet.
Interesting article. So it’s Goliath vs Goliath. This would be Microsoft money down the drain. I’m a Google fan and would be sticking with them regardless.