Software giant Microsoft and media conglomerate News Corp are reportedly in talks to become allies in the fight against Google, with the possibility of removing news content from the company’s search results.
The reports come after News Corp chief executive and billionaire Rupert Murdoch said last week that Google would go bankrupt if news organisations barred their sites from appearing in the company’s search results.
Sources have told the Financial Times that talks between the two companies may result in News Corp removing all its content from Google and instead delivering exclusive content to Microsoft’s Bing engine.
Comments last week indicated Murdoch is looking for more ways to strike out at Google, which he says is cheapening news content by allowing it to be accessed for free.
When asked by Sky News why the company hasn’t removed its sites from Google, Murdoch replied, “I think we will.”
“The people who simply just pick up everything and run with it – steal our stories, we say they steal our stories – they just take them. That’s Google, that’s Microsoft, that’s Ask.com, a whole lot of people… they shouldn’t have had it free all the time, and I think we’ve been asleep.”
Bing, launched in May, controls only 10% of the online search market in the US but still trails behind market leader Google, which controls over 60%. Bing’s traffic would increase if users were forced to go there for news content removed from Google’s results, possibly allowing Microsoft’s site to compete with the market leader.
News Corp would “de-list” its sites from Google results, which the search company itself has said is able to be achieved by any website through including certain types of code.
Google spokesman Gabriel Stricker said Google has a “clear policy of respecting the wish of content owners” by allowing them to prevent material from being seen on certain sites, including Google search results. But he also said news organisations would benefit from appearing on Google’s pages.
“We believe search engines are of real benefit to newspapers, driving valuable traffic to their websites and connecting them with new readers around the world,” he told the Financial Times.
While Microsoft may benefit from the exclusive deal, a major risk would be that News Corp would lose traffic gained from Google users who are unwilling to switch to Bing. About 11-14% of News Corp’s traffic on its US sites, including Dow Jones, Fox News and the New York Post, comes from Google referrals.
The talks come after several news organisation executives have spoken out against Google, saying the search engine’s news aggregator has cheapened the industry. Many have been forced to find new ways to generate revenue as the popularity of free news continues to grow.
This has culminated in Murdoch’s plan to charge users for news content, which is expected to appear next year.
But Murdoch’s plan has already come under fire from entrepreneurs. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said in a speech that ignoring Google wouldn’t last long.
“They should be looking at this as an opportunity to try something radically different and find out a way to make a ton of money from being radically open rather than some money from being ridiculously closed,” Stone said.
Greg Stirling, principal at research firm Sterling Market Intelligence, told Bloomberg that the move is “self-destructive”.
“The implication is that Microsoft would somehow compensate News Corp. for [the deal], but there’s a meaningful number of page views that come to these publications from Google’s search results.”
Patrick Stafford is a freelance journalist and a former deputy editor of SmartCompany.
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