Digital battle over news moves to search engines
Jinfo Blog

23rd November 2009

By Penny Crossland

Item

The debate over whether or not to introduce or re-introduce paywalls (as the case may be) to newspaper’s online sites (see http://www.vivavip.com/go/e24652 ; http://www.vivavip.com/go/e22457 ; http://www.vivavip.com/go/e19910), recently moved to a spat between Google and News International. In a number of interviews, Murdoch has referred to how he would like to lead other publishers in a kind of boycott of Google(http://digbig.com/5barcy) - he would love to prevent the search engine from indexing the Wall Street Journal and his other digital newspapers. Not that any industry commentator believes that that is feasible. Now we learn from the Financial Times (http://digbig.com/5barcn) that Microsoft’s Bing is supporting News Corporation in their effort to pull news sites from Google. It would seem that Microsoft, keen to do almost anything to increase Bing’s market share of the search engine sector, has had discussions with News Corporation and others about paying them to remove their sites from Google’s search index. Microsoft is no doubt encouraged by the latest search-engine rankings from comScore which show that Bing is gaining momentum ( http://digbig.com/5barcp) in the fight over market share. However, although Bing is nearing the 10per cent market share mark, it is still nowhere near Google , which in October captured 65.4 % of all searches conducted in the US. Making Bing the only place where you can find quality news from sources such as the WSJ, New York Times or the Washington Post would certainly make many online users switch search engine. However, one could only wonder at the exorbitant sums Microsoft would have to pay publishers to persuade them to give up on all the traffic Google sends them. Also, with breaking news spreading so fast via the internet these days, would news not end up somewhere on Google anyway? Desperate times seem to be leading to desperate measures...

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