Bing Proposes Exclusive Alliance With News Corp, Wants To Change Internet Search Business For Good

Yesterday, the New York Times ran an article that may end up being a watershed moment in online history. According to the report, Microsoft is hoping to create an alliance with News Corp, one of the biggest news conglomerates in the world, to remove news links from Google and bring them over to Bing.

Essentially it’ll make Bing the only search engine to offer any news stories from News Corp sites. The story highlights a few advantages and disadvantages of the move from the perspective of Rupert Murdoch, who controls News Corp, Google and Microsoft. We break them down for you.

For Microsoft, this is a step in a whole new direction for their search engine. They’ll be the exclusive provider of News Corp content through searches and have deep pockets to make this deal happen. They already have similar deals with online giant eBay, where customers get discounts on items on eBay if they search and find it using Bing.

For News Corp, this is the latest in their move to charge for all online content. Rupert Murdoch has made it clear that he wants users to pay for content and in the NY Times article said he’d rather have less readers as long as they’re willing to pay for the content.

Google doesn’t seem to be too worried. They control over 65% of the search market in the United States and says they’re Google News site pushes over 100,000 clicks per minute to news sites. But if Microsoft continues to push to create exclusive deal for search content, Google will make its own push as well. They too have deep pockets and while they’ve recently been acquiring advertising companies, AdMob for $750 million and Teracent for an undisclosed amount, they won’t sit back and let Microsoft cut deals to take away from their search engine hits.

From a consumer stand point, Microsoft’s attempt to create exclusive deals creates a completely different internet. The whole point of the internet is to search freely for whatever content I like on any given search engine but with deals, like the one Microsoft is proposing, it’ll force me to search on engines that I prefer not to use. No consumer should be forced to use a specific search engine for content if they don’t want to. In the internet world, it just seems wrong and if it does happen, it’ll be a new kind of business, a first for the World Wide Web.

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