Proper Criminals » Google

Murdoch is really biting the hand that feed’s him

austin — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 15:06:58 +0000

According to Experian’s Hitwise service, Google and Google News accounts for 25% of the daily traffic to WSJ.com and 44% of them are users that haven’t visited in over 30 days…

In Murdoch’s interview with Sky News he said “I think we’ve been asleep. It costs us a lot of money to put together good newspapers and good content. They’re very happy to pay for it when they buy a newspaper, and I think when they read it elsewhere they’re going to have to pay.”

Completely disappearing from Google search engines for topical news content is an early death warning. Especially in this time of change and shift towards an increasingly important mobile search market (Google’s purchase of AdMob for $750M) where News Corp content will not be from the onset?

Read the Mediapost article here

Rupert Murdoch on the paid content wall and the whole internet regulation thing…

austin — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 14:23:47 +0000

Here is a great interview with Rupert Murdoch from Sky News in Austrailia. He discusses actively removing or hiding content from internet aggregators such as Google and Microsoft as well as not valuing the type of traffic their search engines send to content destinations.

Mr. Murdoch mentions “stealing” from “comptetiion” quite a bit. The last half of the interview goes into global economy, politics and general opinions… Try not to imagine him talking to a kangaroo with glasses while watching…

Read the article from mUmbrella here and ironically the Youtube video here

Google Music search gets exclusive songs… needs UI tweak…

admin — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 14:57:30 +0000

Not only is Google partnering with MySpace and Lala to bring music listening and purchase results front and center on search results but now they are offering exclusive tracks and free downloads from both services. This is great in theory but in execution it is lacking one small touch that would make it brilliant.

One of the exclusive and free downloads is from the hip indie french band of the moment Phoenix who are offering the track “Lasso (2 Door Cinema Club RMX)” free at Lala.com. Take a look at the image of the first result when searching for Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix (Remix Collection):

Do you know which one is the exclusive track? Do you know which one is the free one? If a user could know at a glance which tracks are free downloads or exclusive to Google it would improve the user experience and click conversion immensely.

This does not discount the amazing value and no small feat for Google to provide these free and exclusive tracks but it would be a small UI tweak to let the user know there how amazing the value is in using Google to search for music.

Now if someone were to create a product to aggregate these free downloads and exclusive results and allow users to search/filter… hmm…

Read full article here: Venture Beat