As we first reported to you back on October 11th, Rupert Murdoch (the owner of News Corp) wants to ban Google from indexing the content on his websites because he doesn’t like the fact that his news content appears for free in Google News.
What seemed like the ramblings of a mad man at the time now looks like at attempt to make money from his online content at the expense of Google. Murdoch does indeed want to ban Google from indexing his websites, costing them millions of unique visitors every day, because he feels that a pay deal with Microsoft’s Bing might be better business.
You remember Bing; it launched a few months ago and was the flavour of the, well, day, until everyone realised that yes, it was still Microsoft, and the results it offered were random at best.
Despite the rather small market share of Bing, Murdoch believes Microsoft will be willing to pay News Corp for the pleasure of indexing its websites and displaying its content. Can you imagine a website that pays you to send you traffic? This is fantasy land stuff, and only Microsoft would even contemplate getting involved in such a deal.
If of course Microsoft does pay Murdoch to use his news content, imagine how subverted Bing’s search results would be then? As if they’re not bad enough now, with paid results from News Corp clogging up the index, Bing would be next to useless… no wait, it is already.
Bing’s 10% search market share would diminish even more with a great move such as this.
What prompted this bizarre turn of events was Murdoch’s belief that Google was stealing its content to use on its own website. Google however is the most used search engine in the world, and if News Corp and Murdoch don’t want Google to ‘steal’ their content, simply adding a line to their robots.txt file would sort that right out.
No more stolen content, no more traffic from Google. Easy fix.
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