It was inevitable that someone would seriously consider taking Google's dare.
Rupert Murdoch is reportedly thinking about removing all of News Corp.'s content from Google and striking an exclusive deal with Microsoft's Bing.
(Credit: Dan Farber/CNET)For years, Google has all but dared traditional media companies trying to develop online businesses to live without the traffic it sends their way. The folks at the Googleplex make it clear that content owners who believe Google is unfairly indexing (or stealing, depending on your point of view) their content can easily remove that content from Google's massive corner of the Internet.
There's a tradeoff for that independence, of course: Don't expect the advertisers that have signed deals based on site traffic to pay the same amount next year.
News Corp. might be getting ready to do what many think is unthinkable. Reports have surfaced over the last several months, most recently in the Financial Times, that News Corp. is in talks with Microsoft to enact a plan that would see News Corp. properties hiding their content from Google's search engine in return for exclusive listing with Bing.
Rupert Murdoch, News Corp.'s famously cantankerous leader, isn't stupid: Microsoft would also have to pay News Corp. for the privilege of exclusive access to that content. But as Microsoft continues to lose billions of dollars a year on its online business, can it afford to be successful with this strategy?
Even if Microsoft is willing to cough up a huge sum (which Kara Swisher at Boomtown thinks is unlikely) for News Corp. content, this plan would only have a chance of turning the tables on Google if News Corp. and Microsoft can convince other large media companies to follow their lead.
First off, the practice of actually removing News Corp. content from Google would be relatively simple. News stories from The Wall Street Journal, commentary from The New York Post, and videos from News Corp.'s myriad cable and satellite television organizations can be tagged with a "noindex" tag, and Google won't index those pages as they are published. This also applies to pages that have been previously indexed, since they will be crawled again, this time with the new tag attached.
However, News Corp. would then need a backup plan to compensate for the revenue it would lose from the precipitous drop in traffic. With 65 percent of the search market, Google is the largest Web site in the world as measured by traffic. And its stated goal is to be the best information kiosk ever created by fielding queries and sending searchers on their way as fast as possible.
Murdoch has proposed removing his Web sites from Google only after constructing pay walls like the one used at the Wall Street Journal to limit free access to content, which is a somewhat controversial notion in this media era.
What News Corp. and Microsoft are reportedly discussing, however, is slightly different. Under the scenario outlined by the Financial Times, it does not appear that News Corp. would erect pay walls for all its content upon removal from Google. Instead, it would continue to make that ad-supported content available for free exclusively through Bing, helping offset the decline in traffic with a cash payment.
The two companies would then presumably market the hell out of the arrangement, because it would require a sizable shift in consumer expectations for Internet search. Right now, people are used to the idea that DirecTV is the only television provider that can offer a full package of NFL games every week, or that Comcast's Versus channel isn't available on DirecTV because of a licensing spat.
But that's not what they expect when they search online for news or information about a certain topic, and it would take some effort to educate them that The Wall Street Journal or Fox News' content can only be found if you're searching on Bing. Microsoft has already invested $100 million into Bing advertising, and would need to increase that amount to drive home the point that Bing is the only place you can find Fox News stories.
So will enough people be interested in that content as to change their search behavior and dramatically increase Microsoft's search market share? It's hard to see News Corp. moving the needle by itself, but modest results could embolden Microsoft to cut similar deals with other news companies and start the ball rolling toward the idea of Bing 2.0 as "the world's news search engine." That would be an interesting product.
As with just about everything, however, such a deal will likely come down to the amount Microsoft is willing to invest in such a project. Microsoft's Online Services Division, which runs Bing, is currently hemorrhaging money to the tune of $480 million in losses during its first quarter alone. Setting up content deals with the media industry would increase short-term costs with an iffy notion of when that investment would pay off in terms of increased search market share. And while Microsoft continues to milk Windows and Office profits, it can't throw money down a rabbit hole forever.
That means there's a sizable chance that this whole operation is geared around News Corp. negotiating a search and technology services deal with Microsoft to replace its current one with Google, which expires next June. Installing Bing as the search provider on News Corp. sites would generate increased searches for Microsoft while denying a common enemy Google some revenue, without kick-starting a huge battle that would have wide-ranging effects.
Murdoch has been able to tap into a well of frustration among those in the traditional media business over the way they are unable to duplicate the profits they enjoyed in the offline world on the Internet. But does he really want to call Google's bluff?
If so, he's banking on the notion that while basic news is a commodity, opinion and analysis is not. And whatever you might think of the various News Corp. properties, it's hard to argue they haven't earned a reputation for themselves as a unique source of opinion and analysis.
Yahoo is adding more context to news searches, bringing photos, videos, and even tweets into its search results page.
Searchers on Yahoo--who are dwindling--will find new results for newsy events Thursday, when Yahoo launches new tabs on the Yahoo News Shortcut. You've long been able to find links to news stories about a given search query through the shortcut, but you can now find other ways of telling the story with the new tabs, said Larry Cornett, vice president of consumer products for Yahoo Search.
Yahoo may be close to finalizing a deal to outsource the back end of its search business to Microsoft, but it insists that it's still a competitive search company with its decision to focus its research and development on new ways of presenting search results. The new shortcut is one such improvement, although one that's not all that different from what can be found on Google and Bing.
The main difference is that Yahoo will now provide the option of browsing images or tweets related to a given query without having to leave the search results page to click over to the Yahoo News section, Cornett said. Bing surfaces photos and video in its News section but not necessarily in its main search results page, and Google takes a similar approach.
Yahoo is using Twitter's public API to surface tweets, which are also run through a Yahoo algorithm to determine relevancy, Cornett said, declining to provide details on exactly how that works. Yahoo has not secured access to the "firehose" of tweets, whereas Microsoft and Google just signed deals for access to that data as part of their own bid to index tweets.
There have been dozens, maybe hundreds, of companies that have tried to create useful Web browser start pages and content aggregation sites. Popular themes include RSS readers, widget collection pages, and user-filtered news hubs. I've seen and tried a lot of them but rarely use them after a quick look. A new project, iCurrent, has potential to break out of that swamp for me and other users.
iCurrent contains no magical thinking or head-slappy reconceptualizations of news. It's just an aggregation service done well, with useful and clear features for users, and a straightforward sharing mechanism.
You tell iCurrent what you're interested in (examples: Windows 7, Formula 1, the Public Option), and the system will find stories on that topic from its solid lineup of sources, and create a "channel" for you that exists in one of its mainstream categories (in my examples: Technology, Sports, Health).
I found that the system picked good stories in my channels, and from good sources, and that it categorized them mostly correctly. It's easy enough to recategorize topics and add or remove news items. For example, I wanted news on "San Francisco Muni," but iCurrent originally put it in "Business." I moved it to "News." I also added CNET News to the "Sources" list for the topic, just in case we ever cover it.
The iCurrent main screen blends your custom content with news categories you haven't yet flagged (orange box).
(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)On the front page of iCurrent, you get stories from your designated topics in the middle column of the page, and general and trending news on the right. The blend is important -- it keeps you informed on topics you might not be looking for. And it's how you build up your channels at first, by adding topics from the general stories you see.
If there's a channel you like, you can invite other users to it, and invite them to join iCurrent in the process. If you invite someone outright, you can also pre-populate their channel lineup with your channels. This is an important method to spread the love on iCurrent, as it's going to be hard, otherwise, for people to hear about this product. And, as CEO Ramana Rao told me, "Google will probably whack it," meaning that iCurrent stories won't show up in the Google index.
Not that they should. The service doesn't repackage stories, it just links to them. When you want to read a story, you get it from the original source, with a frame at the top (which can be disabled) that leads you back to iCurrent.
iCurrent rewards the engaged reader, but it doesn't require much work at all to make it a compelling experience. As I said at the top of this story, there's nothing really amazing here, just a good understanding of how today's users consume news, and enough technology to put that news in front of them.
It's fast and easy to add sources to the default list for any category.
(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)There are some improvements that I'd like to see: The interface is just a little busy when it comes to adding and removing sources and channels, although it's not unclear. More importantly, coverage of local news is not that good, which is a shame in a news reader that can be highly personalized. I'd also like to see a mobile version.
The product is in private beta now and should be available shortly. You can sign up to be alerted when it goes public. I recommend that.
Rao says iCurrent will make money from advertising. It might. It's more likely it'll make money when Yahoo or Microsoft buys it.
See also: Meehive, YourVersion.
Zensify, the makers of the Zensify iPhone app, have a new iPhone app out called Zen News that helps users discover the latest headlines from a dozen news sources. These range from established media powerhouses like The New York Times, BBC News, and The Washington Post to TweetMeme and soon other online-only news sources.
The app makes use of the same tag cloud navigation found in Zensify, the company's social aggregation tool. This takes the most prevalent topics or keywords and organizes them by size, with the larger words being more important. Users can then drill down into each keyword, which filters the group of stories the app displays.
Once you find a story you want to read, the app gives you a quick summary, as well as the option to either read it in the embedded browser, or hop out to Safari proper. It also lets you "favorite" a post for reading later. These favorites can currently only be viewed while in the app, but the company told us that third party centralized bookmarking tools like ReadItLater and Instapaper are on the road map to be added in later versions. This would let you find stories within the app, then read them when you get back to a machine with a larger screen.
There are plenty of things to like about this app. It's quite zippy over 3G, and switching sources is a breeze. In that way, it's quite similar to the iPhone's included weather app--you just flick your finger and it changes the source. You can also customize what sources you want to see with some simple toggles in the settings menu. This will be more important as that list of sources continues to grow.
Zen News will remain a free app, although Zensify intends to create paid versions of it for businesses that want to hunt for specific topics from a specialized list of sources. The company is also planning to make its currently-free Zensify iPhone app a paid tool beginning November 16, when it will jump up to $1.99.
Zen News lets you view the big stories by keyword (left) or topic (right).
(Credit: CNET)
Hot on the heels of its appointment of a chief technology officer last week, News Corp.'s MySpace on Monday announced that Mark Rosenbaum has been hired as its chief financial officer.
Although the appointment marks the first time that the social network has had a CFO, it is Rosenbaum's second stint at News Corp. He headed up financial operations at Gemstar-TV Guide International, when it was owned by the Rupert Murdoch-helmed conglomerate. More recently, Rosenbaum served as a consultant to MGM.
Mark Rosenbaum's MySpace profile picture.
(Credit: MySpace)In his new position, Rosenbaum report directly to Owen Van Natta, the former Facebook executive who became MySpace's CEO in April, after the departure of co-founder Chris DeWolfe.
Less than two months after Van Natta's hiring, MySpace announced a layoff of nearly 30 percent amid stagnant growth and what was increasingly a losing battle against Facebook in its quest for social-networking dominance. The company called its aim at financial efficiency a "return to start-up culture."
Hiring a chief financial officer is, as a result, a logical step.
"Having led companies at every stage of their development, Mark understands both start-up culture and mature businesses, and is well-suited to guide MySpace's financial organization through its next phase of growth," Van Natta said in a release announcing Rosenbaum's hire. "We're thrilled to add someone with his pedigree and experience to the team."
SAN FRANCISCO--Two new companies are launching products designed to get the news to users faster--and from a wider variety of sources. Both are in private beta and not yet available to the general public but were demoed live at the TechCrunch50 conference.
Thoora is a new tool that clusters and aggregates news. It offers people a way to track the latest headlines with a simple ranking tool, ordering incoming stories by "Web reaction." It uses a mix of sources, including Twitter messages, blog posts, and breaking stories from more traditional news outlets. These stories are then filtered and pushed to a front page as well as Thoora's category pages.
One of the things that factors into what ends up on Thoora's front page is real-time chatter. The company tracks how many news-related tweets there have been about that topic in the last hour, as well as "Twitter impact," which is a percentage of density about that topic per 500 messages across all of Twitter over the past hour. It also tracks things like blog comments and linkbacks.
Thoora tracks hot news topics across a variety of chatter networks including blog comments, tweets, and news stories.
(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET)
Insttant, on the other hand, cuts out traditional news sources entirely and uses Twitter's public stream instead. It takes these tweets and turns them into an interactive news page that covers people, places, and companies, including a way to track trending topics and user sentiment. All of this goes on a front page, which can be reordered and personalized with topics the user wants to see.
One of the service's more interesting tricks is that it automatically creates profile pages for people containing links and interests based on what they've shared in their tweets. This also happens for trending news topics, which makes for a more in-depth news-reading experience, since you can drill down on any topic and see things like recent mentions, related news and links, and a history of how popular it's been in the past few weeks.
Instant's front page is made up entirely of real-time chatter.
(Credit: Insttant)
Related:
Yahoo's Delicious adds a little Twitter
Full TechCrunch50 coverage
The television season is about to arrive full force.
Soon, most of your favorite television shows, as well as new series, will be making their way into your home. But if you're unsure when your show will come back, you want to catch up, or you simply want to track the show as the season progresses, I have you covered with some great sites.
Let's check them out.
Tracking TV
Hulu...There are few better ways to track your favorite shows than to watch them on Hulu, which is backed by NBC Universal, ABC, and Fox.
Thanks to strategic partnerships that Hulu inked with networks, finding and watching your favorite shows is quick and easy. And since the site is ad-supported, you won't need to worry about doling out cash to watch your shows.
I spend considerable time on Hulu. I caught up with last season's of "Family Guy" on the site. The videos run well. The ads, while a necessary evil, aren't that bad. And the quality is outstanding. Even better, you can embed Hulu videos into your blog, making it a great platform to share your favorite shows with friends.
Hulu has outstanding video quality.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)MyTVRSS...When you first get to MyTVRSS, you'll probably be a little sickened by its design. A black background sitting behind pink type makes the site an extremely unattractive target for your attention. But once you realize you'll spend very little time there, you'll get past it.
MyTVRSS lists every television show currently in production. When you click on one of the links on that site, you'll find a show summary, information on the last episode that aired (assuming it isn't a new show), and the series premiere's date and time. Unfortunately, not all the show listings are as informative as I would have liked. For instance, the site's "The Office" page was great. But its "30 Rock" page didn't feature nearly as much information. Your mileage will vary.
As you sift through all the shows on the site, you can pick those series that you watch most often by checking the box next to their titles. At the bottom of the page is a "Create Feed" option. When you click that button, you'll receive a unique RSS feed that you can add to your reader. That feed will alert you when your shows air. For someone like me who easily forgets a favorite show is on, it's a nice service to have.
MyTVRSS is certainly an ugly site.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)_610x325.png)
Google Fast Flip, a new service in testing for Google News.
(Credit: Google)
Google is testing a service that will let newshounds read Web pages of magazines and newspapers like they were flipping through an old-fashioned paper copy.
Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience, plans to demonstrate Google Fast Flip later on Monday at TechCrunch50. It's a Google Labs project that expands the presence of publishers on Google News, organizing and displaying authorized screen grabs of news stories--not snippets--within the Google News site.
For example, readers will be able to scroll through a series of screen grabs bearing the publisher's logo that display stories on the weekend's NFL games or Kanye West's opinions on best female video of the year, also allowing them to browse by categories organized around Google News sections, the most popular stories, or news sources. They'll be able to read some of the story within a section of the Fast Flip site but will need to click through to the publisher's Web site in order to read the full story.
Fast Flip is being tested in partnership with 36 publishers, including The New York Times, Newsweek, and Salon.com, which will get a portion of the revenue from ads that Google plans to sell alongside Fast Flip pages.
Martin Nisenholtz, senior vice president of digital operations at the Times, called Fast Flip "a modest R&D project" designed as an experiment to gauge click-through rates and traffic, rather than any sort of money-making venture. He declined to comment on how much revenue Google would be sharing with the paper.
Google News, of course, has been a lightning rod for criticism from the struggling newspaper industry. Some publishers believe that Google News siphons their content and discourages readers from clicking through to the source of the story by including the headline and a snippet of the story. Others grouse about the way bloggers who are merely writing and commenting on a piece of original reporting can sometimes get more exposure on Google News than the author or publisher of the original story.
Readers will be able to see a portion of the article, but will have to click through for the whole thing. Publishers will get a cut of the revenue from ads sold on the right hand rail.
(Credit: Google)Fast Flip gives publishers more of what they want: a chance to share in the ad revenue generated by Google News combined with the spotlight and traffic that comes along with inclusion in Google News. Mayer hinted that something like this was coming in May, when she testified before Congress that "the structure of the Web has caused the atomic unit of consumption for news to migrate from the full newspaper to the individual article."
But Fast Flip requires publishers to showcase more of their content than a simple Google News listing requires, which could allow readers to completely skip clicking through after getting the gist of the story from the first few paragraphs. On the other hand, a more attractive presentation of the story could attract more clicks than a single headline might.
Since it's a partner-only service for the moment, criticism of Fast Flip will probably be muted. Nisenholtz acknowledged that the Times is trying lots of things these days to gauge what works in Web publishing. "We're in the business of learning around here in part, and we felt that this was an interesting test."
This isn't Google's only attempt to work with an industry that has been so critical of the company in the past. Google is also said to be testing a micropayments service for other publishers that don't want to embrace the free-content movement.
Citizen news site NowPublic has been sold to another company in the "hyperlocal" space, Examiner.com, the two companies announced Tuesday.
The two sites will operate independently, but Examiner will integrate NowPublic's technology into its site and will encourage NowPublic's contributors to also write for Examiner--right now, the buyer says it has grown 200 percent since the beginning of the year (it launched in April 2008) and has 15,000 active contributors, hoping to hit 30,000 by year's end.
NowPublic's executives, including CEO Leonard Brody, will join the management team of Clarity Digital Group, parent company of Examiner.
"Every day, we hear discussions about whether hyperlocal content will ever be scalable, sustainable, or profitable as a business entity," Examiner CEO Rick Blair said in a release. "With the acquisition of NowPublic, we have the technology to further engage our community of more than 17 million unique visitors per month, and distribute our stories in new and innovative ways."
Was this a bargain-basement acquisition? The companies did not disclose financial terms. But an insider in the space told CNET News that NowPublic had been shopping itself to some pretty big media companies for some time at a higher price than potential buyers were willing to pay. The company had raised about $12 million in venture funding.
Many media companies have simply been launching their own "citizen journalism" initiatives, like CNN's iReport and blogging experiments from newspapers like the Washington Post, which could make an exit tougher for the smaller players.
Digital-media companies like AOL and InterActiveCorp have also made plays to dominate the local-news market--AOL recently acquired local-focused start-ups Patch and Going, the former of which was already a personal investment on behalf of CEO Tim Armstrong, and the Barry Diller-run IAC has been placing a big emphasis on business directory Citysearch.
Google News has come under fire in Italy.
(Credit: Screenshot by Tom Krazit/CNET)Updated 10:40 a.m. PDT with Google's response.
Competition regulators in Italy have opened an inquiry into Google News at the behest of publishers who allege they were banned from search results unless they agreed to be part of Google News.
According to reports, Google's offices in Italy were searched Thursday by regulators seeking evidence that Google forced Italian news sites to make their copy available through Google News unless they were willing to be excluded from search result pages. A complaint was filed by an Italian newspaper organization, FIEG, which also decried the lack of information made available to publishers as to how Google News organizes links to stories.
Google Italy representatives were quoted in several places as saying "The Competition Authority has notified us of a claim against Google Italy. We're finding out more details today, although we do know that it's in relation to Google News, which drives significant traffic and new readers to newspaper Web sites."
Later in the day, Google posted a blog item on the inquiry, acknowledging the existence of the claim but spending most of the post explaining how publishers can remove themselves from Google News, but not search results, at their request.
Google News is definitely a sore spot for many publishing companies, who feel Google's news aggregation site siphons readers from their own Web sites. Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search products and user experience, appeared before Congress in May to defend Google against such charges, saying that Google directs an awful lot of traffic--which can be turned into ad revenue--to newspaper Web sites for free.
But allegations that Google is messing with search results pages in retaliation for a business decision are very serious. Google's search results are supposed to be completely automated--driven by algorithms and keywords--and a large part of the company's growth has been driven by the public belief that its search results are gospel.
The New York Times reported that Google had denied the charges regarding the search results. Google's blog post Thursday did not specifically address that allegation but said there is a mechanism for removing one's content from Google News yet leaving it among search results.
The inquiry also comes at a point in Google's history where just about everything it does gets examined through an antitrust lens, with a new administration in the U.S. taking a closer look at several parts of its business.
