Tuesday, November 24, 2009

What would delisting news from Google mean?

With the battle between News Corp and Google (in reality the whole of the open web) now warming up, thanks to Murdoch and Microsoft getting cosy, it is perhaps prudent to take a look at exactly the impact that delisting news sites from Google would have.

This is exactly what a German investigation unearthed when looking at what the effect on Google.de would be if most of the country’s publishers delisted their content from it.
The results found:
five percent of the top 10 (Google search) results came from the news organisations - and this is with publishers co-operating with Google.
It is therefore likely that the effect on Google would be minimal and the content gap would simply be filled by other news sources. This would especially true if it was only News Corp content unavailable to the whole web and put it behind a paywall or available via Bing.com

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