How Helpful Would Exclusive Search Rights Be For The Wall Street Journal?

So there’s talk of Rupert Murdoch making The Wall Street Journal unavailable on Google search and only available on rival search engine Bing. The idea is that Microsoft (which owns rival search engine Bing) pays the Journal to take itself off of Google’s search engine. The Journal then earns revenue by getting more people to go either directly to its site instead of through Bing. This way Google earns more of a profit than it does now by allowing readers to get its content through a Google search or Google Reader.

It’s an interesting idea, one I’m still reading up on, and one that would certainly generate revenue for the Journal but I’m skeptical of how good an idea it is. People who want to read the Journal‘s news don’t always read it through Google, some of them…you know…go to the actual site. It’s not that hard. This caveat also applies when considering exclusive search rights as a partial solution to the newspaper business problem model. People don’t type in ‘latest news’ in the Google search engine to find the latest news. Presumably they wouldn’t do that if it were at Bing either. Instead I bet they would do what they’ve been doing: going to the actual site or using an RSS feed. If that’s the case (which I highly suspect it is) then this plan will earn some money but it’s hardly a cash cow.

–Daniel Strauss