Microsoft vs Goolgle- A war among Giants

The ongoing war among the top giants Microsoft and Google took a new turn when Microsoft opens a new front in its battle with google. Microsoft is looking to block Google, the search giant, from indexing their content and make it searchable only through "BING", the new search engine service from Microsoft. Bing is looking to gain market share from Google.

"Microsoft" the world largest software company may pay Time Warner, News Corporation and other media firms to block google from indexing their content and make it searchable only through "BING". Microsoft has discussed this with New Corp and the negociations are still going on. It is a sign not only of how far Microsoft is willing to go in order to turn Bing into a serious rival to Google, but also of how the entire internet could well evolve.

It should come as no surprise that News Corp would be the first to discuss such a deal. Rupert Murdoch, its boss, has long criticised Google for “stealing” his newspapers’ stories by pasting links to them on Google’s own site. He has also announced loudly and often that he wants to charge for more of the content that his firm puts online. What is more, he needs to renegotiate the deal that in 2006 gave Google the exclusive right to place search ads on MySpace, a social network owned by News Corp. Back then Google agreed to shell out $900m over three years for the privilege, although it may in the end pay less, as traffic on MySpace has not met the targets specified.

According to Hitwise, a market research firm, Google is unlikely to want to pay such a high price again, given that declining traffic and thus disappointing advertising revenues. Google also knows that Mr Murdoch will think twice before blocking the biggest source of traffic for his newspapers’ websites. More than a quarter of all visitors to the Wall Street Journal’s site, for instance, come from Google, which is in line with most other newspapers.



Microsoft, for its part, cannot afford to let Google rule the search business and, by extension, a big part of the online advertising that is expected pay for many services in the age of cloud computing. In recent years the firm has invested billions in its search capabilities. With Bing, it has at last come up with a plausible alternative, which works better than Google for some searches, such as comparing prices of consumer electronics or looking for cheap flights. To boost Bing’s market share, Microsoft in July agreed with Yahoo!, another online giant, to merge both firms’ search activities.

Since its launch in June, Bing’s market share has grown by two percentage points to nearly 10% of all searches in America, but Yahoo!’s has dropped by the same figure to 18%. Exclusive content deals may just be what Microsoft needs to reach a combined 30%, which some experts see as the minimum to make a dent in Google’s business. Microsoft appears ready to spend whatever is needed: up to 10% of the company’s overall operating income over the next five years, according to Steve Ballmer, the firm’s boss. This would, all things being equal, add up to some $11 billion.

Although, Microsoft's search engine BING has to go a long way to compete with the existing search Giant Google... Please feel free to post your valuable comments or add something to this post.