Off the usual topic, the growing debate around Rupert Murdoch's News Corp vs Google (link to The Independent) is hugely interesting, and it's taken up a lot casual thinking time in the last week. I don't subscribe to the idea that Murdoch 'doesn't get the web', 'has no idea about online' or any other such sentiments. This is a guy that paid $650 million for the most popular online social network at the time (MySpace), then got Google to pay a massive $300 million a year for three years to put ads on it (so, who paid for MySpace, exactly?). This turned out to be a bad deal for Google.
As is usual when a topic takes my interest, I've read a lot about it, I've talked to a number of people about it (not enough) and the thoughts keep churning....
One of the most interesting bloggers (nay journalists) writing on it is Tom Foremski in Silicon Valley (Articles: Rupert Murdoch and the dirty little secret about Google Traffic and, Google could lose more than Murdoch). Michael Arrington also had a good piece the topic.
Today, Foremski wrote a related post about Search, noting that Techmeme (the highly popular technology news aggregation site) has doubled its human editors to six. According to Foremski, this means search algorithms from Techmeme's to Google's, are losing their effectiveness:
"Google’s foundation for its search algorithm, PageRank is far less effective today than at any other time.... Techmeme doubling its editors to six is a watershed moment in search."
There's a massive shift in play with search, with online content, with paid content vs free content. I'm beginning to agree with those suggesting Google is, in some way, vulnerable to it. From a publisher's perspective, this is much bigger than asking, "Will you miss New Corp from Google'. That question seems to miss the bigger picture: What if lots of people took their content off Google?
And, of course, there' s many more questions than that or even, 'Will Google miss News Corp' and vice-versa. Google's UK Director, Matt Brittin (a former Trinity Mirror director of online and digital - Trinity Mirror owns the UK Daily Mirror tabloid and a few others), says Google doesn't make much money from news sites. From CNN:
Matt Brittin, Google's UK director, told a Society of Editors conference that Google did not need news content to survive. "Economically it's not a big part of how we generate revenue," he said.
But what if all publishers blocked it? What impact do social recommendations and links have on Google's effectiveness or even relevance (that's related to what Foremski posted about today)?
I also think about my own use of Google. It's very rarely for the latest or real time news (I use RSS, Twitter and bookmarks still, not Google News). In fact, the times I use Google is usually for a product search, or digging out an old blog post, old news articles that usually show up in organic links, or a reference that I can't remember the exact location of, and I'll very rarely, if ever, click on a 'sponsored link' (I dont' remember ever buying anything via one, ever).
Google has made a lot of money in recent years by making better use of online information than anyone else, in a decade when online content and web use exploded and continues to grow exponentially.
But Google's incredible foundation service (Google Search - it is amazing, let's not forget) and the subsequent business built around it, has pulled billions of advertising dollars into Google's coffers, while publishers and media creators go to the wall or get nothing. That can't carry on indefinitely, and I think Foremski's words are true: This is a watershed moment, whether Google wins or gets stung badly, or Murdoch's lifetime work goes to the wall, or he strikes a deal and wins with Bing. There's plenty more to come in this turf war.
