Microsoft to get exclusive access to News Corp's content
Updated
Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation has held talks with Microsoft on a plan to remove his News Corporation content from the rival search engine Google.
Murdoch has been at war with Google and other Internet sites he claims are 'stealing' stories from his newspapers. Under the deal revealed in the Financial Times Microsoft would pay News Corporation to have all its content "de-indexed' from Google.
Presenter: John Shovelan
Speaker: Jeff Jarvis, associate professor and director of the New York School of Journalism
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SHOVELAN: Microsoft and Rupert Murdoch have joined forces against a common enemy. For months Mr Murdoch has been railing against the search engine Google and Microsoft wants to transform its own puny search engine Bing into a true competitor to Google. The impetus for the discussions between Microsoft and News Corporation came from News Corp. The talks have arrived at a proposed deal that will likely attract the attention of anti-trust lawyers. Under the agreement Microsoft, with its available huge war chest to fight Google, would pay News Corporation to remove its content from the Google search index. That News Corporation content then would be available on Bing. Jeff Jarvis, associate professor and director of the New York School of Journalism and author of 'What Would Google Do', says the deal will achieve little for Mr Murdoch and won't affect Google's dominance on the net.
JARVIS: You know the newspaper industry is looking for enemies. It's looking for people to blame for their troubles when only they should blame themselves. They have 15 years to figure out the future on the web and they haven't and so now they're desperate and they are looking for someone to blame and Google is the most convenient to blame because it's the most successful online.
SHOVELAN: What could they achieve though together?
JARVIS: A Microsoft/News Corp deal would be at most a mosquito bite on an elephant's butt. It would be unnoticed. It wouldn't have any impact whatsoever on Google. A German company did a study of Google's search results with news publishers. They looked at the top news publishers in more than 1,000 domains in Germany and if they all pulled out it would affect only five per cent of the first page of Google search results. In the US Bing, Microsoft search engine, has only 10 per cent market share. Google has more than 60 per cent. In the UK Google has more than 80 per cent market share. So why would News Corp pull itself away from an important means of discovery of audience. Hitwise, a company in the US, did a study of the traffic that goes to wsj.com, the Wall Street Journal, and found that 15 per cent of people who had landed there on the web came right through Google. Twelve per cent right from Google News. Hitwise says that what WSJ would lose 25 per cent of its traffic if it cut off Google.
SHOVELAN: Mr Murdoch has already said readers will have to pay for his newspapers online. And after years of failing to establish itself as a search engine provider, Microsoft has said that the company is prepared to spend heavily for many years to come to build Bing into a real competitor to Google.
