It’s an old newspaper trick – buy the scoop – but is Microsoft now using the same trick – buying up the online side of newspapers like The Times and The Sun in return for them being exclusively on Bing and not findable on Google. It’s a risky strategy but will it work? TechCrunch has a good read about how Murdoch can really hurt Google but not everyone shares the site’s opinion with some saying it will add to the doom of Microsoft and News Corp. (Rajin Jasti also has some good perspective and Mariamz points out the work involved between this and the ACAP – the Automated Content Access Protocol – which could be a bit of a gamechanger.)

It’s an interesting strategy: a number of titles are considering walking away from the largest shop-market in the world and being exclusively linked/found via Bing. In return, a lot of these titles will start to charge for access to their sites, bringing in some revenue and perhaps even profit.

Now it might be possible to get people to leave Google (history has taught us that it will fall one day and MS has as good a chance as anyone, Bing is a very decent service) but to then also have them make the mental leap of having to pay for news when they believe it should be free is an exercise in making life hard for yourself.

Will people go to Bing for the news if it’s news they have to pay for? You are asking people to go against two practically built-in-stone beliefs of web users: Google is the search engine and news should be free.

It’s one thing to get the horse to come and drink your water – which is 99% identical to the water at the larger drinking hole – but it’s another challenge to get the horse to pay for it.

(and horses don’t normally carry wallets, but that’s an issue for another day.)

People who come via a search engine are only looking for info on one story/topic, so they’ll read the link they want (and perhaps a few related articles if the site has some) and then leave. That’s how it works. Newspapers still expect something more, which is unrealistic. The only reason they will stay there is if a) there’s lots of content they want or b) they associate with the newspaper brand - but if they already associated with the brand, they wouldn’t be coming via a search engine.

Now, (and I don’t know how much of it is out there) I’m aware of a lot of papers in the Western world have been doing their own research into this area and have worked out that they can survive on massively (up to 90-95%) reduced levels of traffic – as long as those who remain are paying a set – and not large – sum. But do you harm yourself more by being out of Google than in it?

(I still maintain that newspapers lost a trick by not becoming the search engines of record and letting Google/AltaVista/Bing and so on step up instead.)