Microsoft will pay for exclusive search results

 

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Posted on 23 Nov 2009 at 11:07

Microsoft is willing to pay publishers such as Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp to delist their news websites from Google, according to reports.

Murdoch has been the most vocal critic of Google, accusing it of “stealing” publishers’ content with services such as aggregator Google News.

News Corp is already preparing to put up pay walls around its newspaper sites and block Google from accessing its pages, in a bid to prevent the search firm from harvesting its content for free. Now, it appears Microsoft is preparing to up the ante by paying publishers to delist from Google and appear exclusively on its search engine, Bing. Microsoft is reportedly in negotiations with News Corp and several other leading publishers over such a deal.

A source in the publishing industry has told the Financial Times that the Microsoft proposal “puts enormous value on content if search engines are prepared to pay us to index with them”, though the source accepta that Microsoft has its own motive.

“This is all about Microsoft hurting Google’s margins,” the source said.

Microsoft is aggressively attempting to win back search market share from Google by investing heavily in Bing. The company’s search engine underwent a radical overhaul and rebranding earlier this year, while the UK version of Bing left beta earlier this month, albeit without some of the features of its US big brother.

Microsoft seemingly hopes that tempting publishers away from Google would irreparably damage services such as Google News, and give it the edge over the market leader when it came to delivering search results on breaking stories.

Google last week attempted to play down Murdoch’s threat to pull his sites from the search engine, claiming they were of little commercial value to its search business.

Author: Barry Collins