Microsoft's impending deal to allow Bing to be the exclusive search engine for The Wall Street Journal and other Murdoch sites can only be described as stupid.
Forget about whether the price is too high (reports peg it at $50mm), if it includes Fox News and MySpace, or if gating news can every work as a long-term strategy.
The real question is: what's in it for Microsoft? Absolutely no one is going to use Bing more often because the results will include those sites, or a different search engine because they won't.
The die-hard WSJ and Fox readership will simply go straight to the source. No one else will notice. Maybe you could argue that the search quality will be infinitesimally lower quality on Google. It's a weak argument, but still no one will notice. Tomorrow there will be more free sources of news than there were yesterday.
By the way, I tried to use Bing exclusively when it came out, just to encourage industry diversity. But after about a month I gave up.
I liked the pop-up extra text when you hover. Unfortunately, it takes a second to load, which doesn't sound like a lot, but every extra second or step is a disincentive, especially when you might have to scan through dozens of entries to find the one you want. I frequently forgot to use it. Then, the hover text usually didn't have enough info. Finally, the little bar that prompts the extra text to pop-out is too small. Again, another second wasted finding just the right spot. Why not start caching all the hover text as soon as the page loads and then show the text automatically when you mouse over any part of the result?
The killer, though, was that I found I had to go through more entries to find "good" results. I found myself paging to additional sets of results more often.
If Microsoft has $50mm to spend to improve their search position, how about improving the hover usability? Or implementing some other innovations? Or improving their algorithms? These ideas are too crazy?
If this deal goes down, it will be clear sign that Microsoft simply has too much cash that it doesn't know what to do with, and they should pay it out as a one-time dividend to shareholders.
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