Bing to pay news sites to get their content removed from Google!

Varun Bihani — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 03:34:01 +0000

The fierce battle between Microsoft’s Bing & Google is getting fiercer. Ever since the launch of Bing in June 2009, Microsoft has been trying to capture the online search engine market share. Though Bing has come out as the fastest growing search engine in recent months, it still falls way behind Google. From online advertisements to cash back rewards campaigns, Microsoft has spent millions already to attract online surfers to use Bing. But now they have come up with a new strategy to garner more search volume.

As published in Financial Times on November 22, 2009, Microsoft is in talks with various news publishing companies like News Corp who owns The Wall Street Journal (in US), The Times (in UK), Daily Telegraph (in Australia) etc to have them de-index or remove their content from Google. In return, these media companies will get paid!

If that happens, we all would be really interested to see how will Google react. Will they pay more than what Microsoft offered? And if they do, we will see a new money making opportunity for the media companies to pull back their sinking ship. If search engines starts fighting for the exclusive rights of the content, we will be in a new era of web search.

Microsoft is in talks with News Corp to De-index its pages from Google

I can’t just imagine a scenario where the roles will be reversed. Google, Bing ,Yahoo and Ask are competing not only for internet surfers but they start bidding for crawl-able content on the web. Obviously, news websites & bloggers are the clear winners here. Not only are they getting paid from their advertisers, they will see a new stream of revenue flowing in from this. And I am sure this stream will get them much more than what they get paid now. I can’t stop myself from thinking of a day when every single internet user is becoming a journalist, capturing the latest news & writing a unique content to post on his personal blog and wait to be contacted from the search engines to buy his content.

We may even hit the era where more players join the search engine war. Every warrior shows the unique content. So if I want to read health news, I will go to, say, healthyengine.com (a fictitious search engine which publishes exclusive news about health industry) instead of Google because Google does not have the rights to publish those news!

These were just some random thoughts that were raised in my mind when I read the news. I would love to hear more thoughts from you guys when you read this article.

And of course, if you liked reading our blog, do subscribe to our RSS Feed to read more useful & interesting articles in future.

Share this article with friends

KPMRS Blog » de-index

Bing to pay news sites to get their content removed from Google!