Nov
15

Murdoch vs. Google

Posted under General by Erez Zundy

This is the first post that is not about PPC marketing. Don’t expect to see many of those now, but every now and then I will post something that is somehow irrelevant to PPC.

This one though is relevant to search in general.

You must have all heard that Rupert Murdoch is tired of how his newspapers are doing online and decided that Google is to blame and specifically Google news. You see, when users get the newspaper they want without actually reading the newspaper, the newspaper loses the number of visitors and thus the advertisers want to pay less.

So Murdoch wants his newspapers to be out of Google’s index. When he first said it, Google’s reply was somewhat similar to “I dare you..”, but I actually think it’s a really good idea. Let me tell you why:

Well, as you all know, search engines are making a hell of a lot of money by putting relevant ads next to relevant content based on a user search queries. It the current situation, a lot of businesses, including Murdoch newspapers are depending on Google and how Google is ranking them in order to get traffic and therefore money. Out of all the businesses involved here, Google of course is making the most money.

Now, what if Google had no content to show to the searching user? Would it still make money out of these search queries? I think that after a while, the users will just stop searching for those queries on Google, and as we established before, less users means less money. So let’s say no one lets Google index their content, in this situation, Google depends on all other businesses to allow them to index their content and make money out of it. Seems to me that Google will need to pay some money in order to index this content. Getting the point?

So Murdoch is now in some kind of negotiation with Bing in order to allow just Bing to index the content. That gives Bing a huge advantage over Google since Murdoch newspapers have a lot of loyal readers that will just look for the content on Bing, or will get it directly through the non-existing (yet) Bing news. I think this is worth some of Microsoft’s money if they want to even things up with Google.

If such a thing will actually happen, I believe it could change our industry. Search engines will now have to give something back except for relevant ads.

Basically what I’m trying to say is that today, most businesses and websites depend on Google’s algorithm and mood (yes, mood) in order to make a living and many companies are doing everything they can in order to please Google. But as a matter of fact, Google needs their content in order to make a living. But Google is not pleasing anyone. Something is ought to change.

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