The latest harebrained scheme to save the news business is for a bunch of publishers to cut their content off from Google searches and give Microsoft's Bing exclusive search-engine access to their news.
Good luck with that. Aside from the sheer egotistic insanity of it—do proponents Rupert Murdoch and others really believe that people will flock to a specific search engine for news? Or that Microsoft will shell out big bucks to publishers for exclusivity in the hopes readers will follow?—the fatal flaw in this nutty idea is that, well, not many people use Bing. The Microsoft search engine's market share is less than 10 percent of all search queries (to Google's 65 percent, and that may be a conservative estimate), and exclusive access to a small portion of the news market isn't going to move that needle much. And of course, the traffic loss from a departure from Google—which generally accounts for about one-third of news site traffic—would be huge for publishers. Little Bing won't make that up, even with exclusivity.
Plus, there's still the fundamental problem with all schemes to somehow block Google from indexing certain news sites: There are plenty of other search-friendly news sources out there still available to Google, and its users. Sorry, newsies, that's just the way it is. No exclusive deal with Microsoft, covering a handful of publishers, is going to make any difference.
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