News Corp has rattled its saber in Google's direction for months, as chairman Rupert Murdoch accused the company of "stealing stories" by posting links and short article excerpts on its search engine. Now, he appears ready to strike, by pulling his company's news articles from Google and putting them on Microsoft search engines instead, in return for payment.
A little piece of code in each article would make articles from News Corp publications such as The Wall Street Journal, New York Post and several international titles visible only to search engines that pay. According to the Financial Times (subscription required), Google's rival Microsoft intends to do exactly that.
In the short term, this could be disastrous to News Corp's publications.
Google doesn't need the news — or, to be more precise, it doesn't need any specific news source. If bloggers have taught the world anything, it's that one journalist's facts can become the basis of another journalist's story. (Case in point: This article is a follow-up to the Financial Times article and includes similar information, albeit with another layer of analysis.) If the Wall Street Journal becomes invisible to Google, people who go there to find the news will simply click on articles from other publications that cover the same story.
In order for Murdoch's plan to succeed, a critical mass of larger news publishers will need to join this effort, as Microsoft is apparently asking them to do. (Neither News Corp nor Microsoft is commenting on this story.) Although highly unlikely, Google could join Microsoft in paying for the right to list these "premium" news articles if not doing so means losing access to a large chunk of current events.
More likely, Google will refuse to pay and news consumers will prefer to access whatever news Google offers for free rather than switching to Microsoft's Bing search engine to see whatever articles Microsoft paid to index. The end result: a sort of reverse ghetto, in which established news outlets are confined to websites run by their Microsoft paymasters, while publications that allow any search engine to surface their content become more popular. Trying to save mainstream news publications in this way could ultimately hurt them.
The dream outcome for Murdoch would create separate playing fields for established and unestablished news organizations, with the former receiving payments for merely having their stories listed and the latter available for free, as things stand now. One Financial Times source said the deal "puts enormous value on content if search engines are prepared to pay us to index with them," so news publishers could, in theory, earn more for their content under the plan.
In Murdoch's world, this is exactly how things should work, but we don't live in Murdoch's world anymore.
The road between point A (forcing Google users to ignore News Corp articles) and point B (forcing Google and other search engines to pay for the right to excerpt from and link to news stories) is rocky or perhaps even nonexistent.
See Also:
- News Corp May Charge For Web News, Blasts Amazon Over Kindle Terms
- Murdoch To Google: I Must Block You (Wait For It …)
- Wall Street Journal Takes Paywall Fight to Mobiles
- MySpace Traffic Drop Costs News Corp About $100 Million
- Hands On With Microsoft's New Search Engine: Bing, But No Boom
- Kayak to Bing: Stop Copying Us! - Update
- Bing Rings Up Good First Week
- Microsoft Aims Search Guns at Google With 'Bing': Advertising Age
- Bing Snags Small Gain From Google
Photo: Flickr/allaboutgeorge
