ITV Pays $30M For Controlling Stake In ‘Hatfields … 
Hot Trailer: ‘Anchorman 2′ 
2ND UPDATE: Charlie Sheen Fired Selma Blair From … 
Time Warner Cable Sued For Passing Lakers-Dodgers Costs On … 
Jonah Hill Signs For Management With LBI 
TOLDJA! ‘Dumb And Dumber To’ Proves No-Brainer … 
Salma Hayek’s Animated Passion Project ‘The … 
Relativity Moves Scott Cooper’s ‘Out Of The … 
Hot Trailer: ‘The Lego Movie’ 
Comedy ‘I Didn’t Do It’ Gets Series Order … 
Liv Tyler To Co-Star In Damon Lindelof’s HBO Pilot … 
DreamWorks Animation Launches Effort To Re-Position Itself … 
‘Pacific Rim’ Sequel In Planning Stages, … 
Legendary “Down To Handful” Of Studio Suitors: … 
UPDATE: Dan Harmon Apologizes For Comments Slamming … 
Deadline Expands: Hires Washington Post Journalist Lisa De … 
MGM & BermanBraun Sign TV Production Deal, First-Look … 
EMMYS: ‘Big Bang Theory’s Science 
‘Client List’ Season 3 Pickup In Limbo Over … 
Amazon Orders Cop Drama Pilot Based On Michael … 
Lionsgate Acquires Pulitzer Prize Winner ‘Devil In … 
The Financial Times is reporting this morning that Rubert Murdoch’s company initiated the discussions still only in the early stages. However, the paper has learned that Microsoft has also approached other big online publishers to persuade them to remove their sites from Google’s search engine. Microsoft seems intent on a direct assault on Google because it puts pressure on the search engine to start paying for content. Murdoch has said that he would use legal methods to prevent Google “stealing stories” published in his papers. Meanwhile, Microsoft has said it’s prepared to spend heavily for many years to make its new search engine Bing a serious rival to Google.
Editor-in-Chief Nikki Finke - tip her here.
Loading ...
all they have to do is remove the meta data from all their pages. gosh. how stupid are these people? this could take centuries though considering how many pages per day his news sites generate worldwide.
sounds like maybe rupert is headed for dementia. does he really want his publishing empire to no long exist (in the minds of anyone under 40)? or maybe even anyone under 50.
Modern search engines don’t rely on metadata much anymore, they parse the web page themselves and find keywords in a proprietary way.The Robot.txt protocol is a voluntary way of blocking search engine bots but it can be ignored and bypassed. IP addresses of search engine bots can be blocked by the server if so desired but it is a pain to do it.
So technology wise, Google can search the Fox news pages without their permission so Fox has to block them in court.
But that is missing the point. Murdoch is looking to the competition (Bing) to bring something extra to the table. Steve B is hungry for a kill shot on Google, so I bet something strategic is behind all of this talk. Murdoch is a risk taker, look at the ratings of the cable news and talk shows now? How dumb is he? Get real.
What a maroon.
It’s almost as if he doesn’t know how the internet or search works
And does Rupert think Google as well as the public won’t hit back?
Microsoft’s Bing would do better to come up with something Original, instead of trying to bully the gorilla, as this particular move has “very bad end” written all over it.
Such as Bing, Bang, and as Google will respond, “Boom.”
However, (always looking for the silver lining), am thinking this could all but rescue the legal industry.
Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch’s sites are specifically directing Google to “steal stories” published on his web sites via their robots.txt files hosted on the server – which could easily be altered to prevent Google from linking to them. (http://online.wsj.com/robots.txt)
It doesn’t seem like good business to remove snippets from the web’s most popular indexing service, that drive people to the full articles on your site. But I guess if another site is offering to PAY for exclusive rights for something that is becoming more and more FREE, you might as well take it.
It’s almost embarrassing that Bing has to bribe sites like this. But maybe it’ll work.
I’m OK with this… Google has an unholy relationship with the government.
Seems to be a lot of monitoring, scrubbing, filtering & blocking going on.
A Bing rival could be our ONLY internet option that enables unfiltered, open searching & news…. for instance, today when Obama assigns a CZAR, we can search & find out who the person really is.
Future freedom with Google… not so sure.
Sell ALL your shares of NEWSCORP NOW!!!!!!!!! From this, it is obvious murdoch doesn’t understand a thing about the internet. What an old idiot.
The good news? Obama’s pushing Net Neutrality.
The bad news? Fox News hits won’t come up when I do a Google search.
Wait? How’s this bad news???
Rat own, Heister!
That’s likely to fail. You can get the same stories from non-News corp papers, so the only effect is less traffic to pages and thus less ad views (and revenue).
The only “pay wall” strategy that has worked is the WSJ’s (part of News Corp) online subscription which businessmen will pay for (at a premium) as a business expense. Murdoch has been trying to remake the WSJ into a NYT clone with bad results. Few will pay premiums for articles on how to be a proper SWPL yuppie in Manhattan.
The problem is basic: Newspapers are not (and generally incapable of) being mass mediums, while retaining a mass medium production cost internally. The NYT, WaPo, LAT all appeal to a thin segment of upper-income, socially liberal, White readers. They have money, but there is not that many of them. Newspapers were in trouble long before the internet, the LAT circulation peaked in 1988.
The problem is the reporters and editors running the papers. Like Hollywood there is a vast social chasm separating their income and social attitudes from potential customers. Pay walls or delisting from Google won’t solve the problem. Exciting content that drives millions of viewers there will.
Drudge Report gets 75 million views a day, I suspect this site gets about 10X more views than Daily Variety or THR. Why? Because of superior content and aggregation, I can check both sites (Drudge and Deadline) and know what I want to know within minutes.
If Microsoft teaming up with Murdoch and News Corp to screw Google so that Microsoft can get an advantage in the search engine biz doesn’t reek of anti-trust then this country is doomed. I hope the Feds look into this in a BIG way.
“all they have to do is remove the meta data from all their pages”
The meta description and meta keywords tags? No, Google isn’t using the latter, and it only uses the former for the blurb if it’s there.
To remove a page from Google you can add a robots.txt file line blocking Google, and Google obeys those. That’s all you need to do.
But the story is not that Murdoch is trying to figure out technically how to do it. Read the story. It’s that Murdoch is negotiation to get some money from other search engines in exchange for doing it.
Found on Google News “Google To Buy Display Advertising Startup Teracent” link to the Wall Street Journal and also credited to WSJ. Clicked on the link and it takes me directly to the WSJ article ON THE WALL STREET JOURNAL WEBSITE! Google is doing them a favor by driving traffic TO their website.
I wish Google would call their bluff and delink News Corp. sites right now. More eyeballs on a story is more advertising to be sold. Everyday. 24/7. I love watching old media fret, fume and sputter trying to stay afloat and adapt to a consumer oriented new media world. Bye-bye Rupert.
i think this is really his way of getting back at bloggers like matt drudge, who in murdoch’s opinion (i’m sure he thinks this) has succeded on the backs of the content from the daily mail and fox news.
but after umpteen years, drudge is an institution. there are hundreds of thousands of other newspapers in the world that are written in english which are not owned by murdoch that would think their lucky stars for an extra 10M hits off of a link on the drudge report so they in turn could increase their ad rate cards.