Newspaper listings may fuel battle of the search engines

Published on Monday 23 November 2009 21:20

MICROSOFT and News Corp have held talks that could result in some of the world's best-known newspapers removing their listings from Google, it emerged yesterday.

In what could be a key turning point in the battle of the internet search engines, Microsoft would pay News Corp to list its website content on its search engine, Bing, and remove its search results from rival Google, sources said.

Other online publishers have also reportedly been approached by Microsoft with a view to removing their content from Google's listings.

Since re-launching its search engine as Bing earlier this year, Microsoft has been looking for ways to challenge the dominance of Google. Earlier this year, the company signed a ten-year global website search partnership with Yahoo, a deal that US and European competition regulators are currently evaluating.

Rupert Murdoch, chief executive of News Corp, which owns a host of newspapers including the Wall Street Journal, has said he wants to make people pay for access to his news websites.

Other publishers – including the New York Times – are also searching for ways to charge for news online, convinced that they must not give their news and other content away for free through search engines such as Google and Yahoo.

A spokeswoman for Microsoft UK said the company did not comment on speculation.

But those working in the industry said they were watching to see what the next step would be. Elisa Dashwood, account director at Edinburgh-based internet marketing agency Ambergreen, said: "Murdoch has laid out a blueprint for how to kick Google in the teeth. All it would take is for someone like Daily Mail & General Trust or Trinity Mirror to follow suit and all of a sudden Google will be asking what's going on."

Dashwood said the case was not cut and dry, and that Murdoch may face problems if he chooses to cut his ties with Google.

She said: "I don't think this would prevent people getting to the news through Google. Social media allows people to pull content from wherever they see it – like newspaper websites – and then stick in on their blogs or tweet about it on Twitter.

"Other people would then still see the stories appear on Google because Google would still be trawling the blog sites."

Dashwood also highlighted the difficulties that could be associated with stopping Google's automated systems from trawling the News Corp websites. Search tags would have to be rewritten to stop Google from finding content while still allowing Bing to catalogue the pages.

According to Dashwood, although Microsoft's Bing search engine had started to build momentum earlier in the year, it was now losing steam, while Google was still holding on to about 89 per cent of the UK market.