News Corp is spoiling Google’s fun (not to mention ours)

So it’s really come down to this? News Corp is thinking about inking a deal with Microsoft/Bing whereby not only will Bing get access to News Corp data (WSJ, Fox, etc.) but they’ll also prevent Google from indexing their sites. This sounds like a lose/lose/lose/lose proposition.

News Corp loses – fewer page views, less revenue for their online content, and to the 90% of Internet users who use Google for search their properties will effectively stop existing.

Google loses (sort of) to the extent people miss the data (not sure what will happen when you force a search on Google to a News Corp domain – will they simply return no results?).

The rest of us lose because universal search will cease to be universal (and if MSFT is willing to pay for an exclusive with News Corp others will follow).

And Microsoft likely loses as well by paying for content that they likely can’t monetize and pissing a bunch of people off in the process.

I’ve been playing around with Bing a bunch lately and actually really like it. But proprietary search arrangements isn’t the way to gain market share – better search is!