Please Think of the Search Engines!
There has been some rumors going around lately that Microsoft’s Bing search engine was interested in buying exclusivity for some Web content. This all started 2 weeks ago or so when Rupert Murdoch, the owner of The Wall Street Journal and many other news outlet said he was considering removing its news sites from Google because, according to him, Google has been stealing all the revenues with tools like Google News. When Microsoft heard of this, they of course did the only logical thing : offer an exclusive deal. I can’t blame them for this at all, I would do the same.
The problem here though is that search engines like Google and Bing work because they index everything. While an exclusive deal might seem like a good idea for Microsoft, I think it’s a disaster waiting to happen in the long run because the minute one such deal gets signed, many many others will be signed very quickly. I can’t be the only one thinking that having to visit multiple search engines because you’re not quite sure which site is on which search engine is a bad thing.
If you’re a Web developer, you know that the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is already a mess. It’s all about optimizing your content and your code to make your search seem better to search engines. Hopefully this Rupert Murdoch thing is just a scare tactic on his part (while he may be sour on Google, I’m sure Google also brings them a ton of traffic, so I doubt he’d do it).
I’ll be watching this closely. I think it’s a crucial issue that’s just as important as Net neutrality. A search engine needs to be neutral and it needs to have access to every public content on the Web. Let the best indexer win and leave business out of it.