Interwebology: When the news becomes the news
Google currently holds 65 per cent of the search engine market share. Many sites that provide hosting also offer tutorials on how to make pages more searchable in order to increase traffic. More traffic means more publicity, visibility, and more money from advertisers vying to stay above the proverbial fold.
So why would anyone snub Google?
Rupert Murdoch has his reasons, apparently. Earlier this month he made headlines by attacking Google, claiming that their news branch's use of headlines and images from News Corp sites violated fair use, and he would seek to have his companies de-indexed. News Corp owns both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, as well as UK news sources the Times and Sun. With revenues from physical copies falling steadily, many initially considered Murdoch's statements to be an attempted scapegoating mounted by someone who simply didn't “get” the Internet.
However, more recently Microsoft has stepped in and offered to pay News Corp for exclusive rights to index its sites via their search engine, Bing. Potentially, Microsoft could compensate for the financial losses News Corp might suffer by losing traffic directed from Google searches.
There are some reports that Microsoft has approached other online publishers with similar offers. These rumours have been considered both a last-ditch effort on Microsoft's part to increase Bing's popularity, as well as a direct assault on Google, who could be pressured by competition to pay for content as well.
While the corporations involved draw up contracts in their boardrooms, Internet users are left speculating as to how these changes might impact their web browsing. Microsoft hopes that Bing will get more traffic; News Corp hopes to compensate for falling revenue; Google hopes Murdoch will simply look like an antagonistic fossil.
But in an age where accessibility is everything, the most likely outcome is that users will simply turn to the path of least resistance in their newsgathering.
Not all news sources are fighting the Internet. MSNBC has embraced one of the latest forms of broadcasting by taking over the @BreakingNews twitter account formerly controlled by BNO News. BNO intends to become less of a consumer aggregate and more of a corporate feed, styling itself as the new AP or Reuters.
When Twitter first burst onto the scene, it was seen as trendy, temporary, and most often pointless in its simplicity. However, it is slowly gaining in legitimacy. In recent months the site has had just under 25 million unique visitors each month, and while many Tweets are still little more than status updates, an increasing trend is towards news, with headlines breaking from both established and fringe sources and then spreading at exponential rates via ReTweets.
Facebook, too, is increasingly becoming a way to not only share one's life, but also one's world. Essentially, anyone who is to some degree followed is now a broadcaster. Rather than simply being spoon-fed the news as selected by the powers that be, users are now deciding what is a top story and what is a footnote.
So what is news to us? Dogpile.com's Favorite Fetches for November 24 included queries about charitable donations, updates on Oprah's impending departure from television, a new movie, a popular clothing line, and a viral video of Food Network personality Paula Deen being hit in the face with a ham. Not one of these stories appeared on the Google News homepage that same day.
In fact, if Murdoch published what we want to know rather than what he wants to tell us, his newspapers would more closely resemble The Onion than The Telegraph.
The kinds of stories that News Corp wishes to publish are not often the kinds of stories that the general public is trying to read online. Perhaps withdrawing from Google would achieve none of the desired goals of any of the parties involved (except, possibly, for Google's antagonistic fossil endeavour).
People who weren't buying The Wallstreet Journal before aren't likely to start simply because it's searchable on Bing, and Microsoft isn't likely to gain traffic by featuring something that few people are even searching for.
The Internet is unique in that its structure is more often dictated by users than designers. The old guard of corporations who want to fully control their product have a limited place in this world, and rather than moving in the direction of their potential market, they're defying and alienating it.
It is interesting how many moguls have had the savvy to build up billion-dollar companies, and yet fail to recognize this directive as ‘bad business.'
So why would anyone snub Google?
Rupert Murdoch has his reasons, apparently. Earlier this month he made headlines by attacking Google, claiming that their news branch's use of headlines and images from News Corp sites violated fair use, and he would seek to have his companies de-indexed. News Corp owns both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, as well as UK news sources the Times and Sun. With revenues from physical copies falling steadily, many initially considered Murdoch's statements to be an attempted scapegoating mounted by someone who simply didn't “get” the Internet.
However, more recently Microsoft has stepped in and offered to pay News Corp for exclusive rights to index its sites via their search engine, Bing. Potentially, Microsoft could compensate for the financial losses News Corp might suffer by losing traffic directed from Google searches.
There are some reports that Microsoft has approached other online publishers with similar offers. These rumours have been considered both a last-ditch effort on Microsoft's part to increase Bing's popularity, as well as a direct assault on Google, who could be pressured by competition to pay for content as well.
While the corporations involved draw up contracts in their boardrooms, Internet users are left speculating as to how these changes might impact their web browsing. Microsoft hopes that Bing will get more traffic; News Corp hopes to compensate for falling revenue; Google hopes Murdoch will simply look like an antagonistic fossil.
But in an age where accessibility is everything, the most likely outcome is that users will simply turn to the path of least resistance in their newsgathering.
Not all news sources are fighting the Internet. MSNBC has embraced one of the latest forms of broadcasting by taking over the @BreakingNews twitter account formerly controlled by BNO News. BNO intends to become less of a consumer aggregate and more of a corporate feed, styling itself as the new AP or Reuters.
When Twitter first burst onto the scene, it was seen as trendy, temporary, and most often pointless in its simplicity. However, it is slowly gaining in legitimacy. In recent months the site has had just under 25 million unique visitors each month, and while many Tweets are still little more than status updates, an increasing trend is towards news, with headlines breaking from both established and fringe sources and then spreading at exponential rates via ReTweets.
Facebook, too, is increasingly becoming a way to not only share one's life, but also one's world. Essentially, anyone who is to some degree followed is now a broadcaster. Rather than simply being spoon-fed the news as selected by the powers that be, users are now deciding what is a top story and what is a footnote.
So what is news to us? Dogpile.com's Favorite Fetches for November 24 included queries about charitable donations, updates on Oprah's impending departure from television, a new movie, a popular clothing line, and a viral video of Food Network personality Paula Deen being hit in the face with a ham. Not one of these stories appeared on the Google News homepage that same day.
In fact, if Murdoch published what we want to know rather than what he wants to tell us, his newspapers would more closely resemble The Onion than The Telegraph.
The kinds of stories that News Corp wishes to publish are not often the kinds of stories that the general public is trying to read online. Perhaps withdrawing from Google would achieve none of the desired goals of any of the parties involved (except, possibly, for Google's antagonistic fossil endeavour).
People who weren't buying The Wallstreet Journal before aren't likely to start simply because it's searchable on Bing, and Microsoft isn't likely to gain traffic by featuring something that few people are even searching for.
The Internet is unique in that its structure is more often dictated by users than designers. The old guard of corporations who want to fully control their product have a limited place in this world, and rather than moving in the direction of their potential market, they're defying and alienating it.
It is interesting how many moguls have had the savvy to build up billion-dollar companies, and yet fail to recognize this directive as ‘bad business.'
