Once again Microsoft is showing it’s dirty claws. According to a report in the Financial Times (also mentioned in the KPMRS Blog), Microsoft is planing to offer to pay publishers to remove their content from Google in an attempt to make its search engine Bing (no link on purpose) the #1 search engine.
According to the FT, one website publisher approached by Microsoft said that the plan “puts enormous value on content if search engines are prepared to pay us to index with them”. – extracted
I cannot believe the greedy minds in the media industry are already thinking about embracing it. Again Microsoft has gotten it all wrong, will they ever learn? Attitudes like this will only promote two things, firstly the dissemination of online content theft, were people will republish full content of paid websites to drive traffic to their sites/blogs and secondly it will take away the choice that users now have of using any search engine they like. This is so “un-internet”!
I agree with the comment on the KPMRS blog by blogger Greg (null pointer) who said:
“How about instead of Microsoft spending millions to make their search results appear (artificially) better than Google’s, they spend that same money to create better search algorithms? That’s real competition!” – extracted
Any webmaster and marketer will know how important it is to keep track of their website ranking, keyword positioning, visits, ROI and so on… There are a lot of interesting tools out there to help us. 
