Mark Cuban's Plan to Kill Google

Mark Cuban, the eccentric owner of the NBA's Dallas Mavericks, has a post in his blog this week suggesting a way to kill Google by paying the top one thousand most popular sites $1M each to leave the Google Index. He wonders if Rupert Murdoch's plan to leave the Google Index could mark the beginning of a full-scale exodus from Google, one which could be expedited with some cash payoffs from Microsoft. Now, I'm no legal expert, but it seems to me that such a ploy would not fly with the government, but for the sake of argument, let's say it would. Why would you want to wipe out Google?

Pay Me, Pay Me, Pay Me My Money Down

I'm sure Microsoft is looking for ways to choke Google. After all, that's what competitors do, but I'm not sure it's in a top web site's best interest to abandon Google, no matter how much cash is involved. If I'm getting a fair amount of traffic from Google, and I make a lot of money, would the million dollar bribe be enough to entice me to cut off that gravy train?

I suppose it's possible. After all a million dollars is not a trivial amount of money to most of us, and if it involved other enticements like placement guarantees and ad deals, it might look good. What's interesting is that the numbers involved in a scheme like this would probably not make a company like Microsoft flinch. Remember, Microsoft was ready to pay $45 billion at one point for Yahoo!.

Play Both Ends Against the Middle

Cuban's plan gets a little more interesting when he suggests that perhaps Google wouldn't stand still while its closest competitor tried to force the market away from its search engine. Maybe Google would up the stakes. After all, they have money too. Maybe the top sites could get Google into a bidding war with Microsoft, but would this be healthy for anyone except the companies that were the recipients of this largess? It probably wouldn't be great for smaller companies who wouldn't be worth the attention in a playing field that was now defined by cash payments.

Too Many Questions

But in the end, there are way too many questions left unanswered. Would Microsoft stock holders stand for this use of Microsoft cash resources in a scheme that still might not work? Would Google up the cash stakes, or more likely tie up such an approach in court for so many years that it wouldn't matter to most of us for a long, long time? Would the government stand by and watch this game without stepping in?

I'm not sure, but for me personally, I can't see the advantage of choking Google in this fashion, or if anyone would be willing to take the risk it would involve of leaving the world's most popular search engine, cash payments not withstanding. Google simply drives too much traffic and why kill the golden goose for spite?

[cwrinn]

Mark Cuban is weird. Maybe he should be considering ways to improve his team and not try to play in a field he knows little of.

[polymath]

If such a scheme were hatched, is Google under legal obligation to let companies leave it's index? That is, "hostile indexing" would be illegal? I'm not so sure. Murdoch's comments themselves seemed poorly considered.

Also, being unable to index sites like myspace would hurt, but I doubt that there are many other sites that would hurt Google too much. Travel sites like Expedia seem to do OK without specific carriers, like Southwest. The only one who loses (convenience) is the customer.

[Carling]

With all the free Linux Operating Systems becoming available these days on Netbooks, Notebooks, Laptops and mobile phones, Then these top websites would soon be replaced, Only fools think they can control what people want
Then again he is an American that thinks he can control the Americans like Microsoft are doing in America where consumers can only buy computers with windows installed on them...

The rest of the world won't except being controlled as easy as the Americans except being controlled, they don't know any better,

[loganf]

What an idiot. Maybe we should pay him to go live under a rock so the Mavericks have a chance at being a decent team. And leaving Google for Microsoft, that's like leaving a demon for the devil. Great plan man.

[Techwriter10]

I'm not sure where you're going with this argument, Carling. If anything the proliferation of netbooks would mean more work getting done on the Web on web sites. Further, I see the underlying OS like Linux and the web sites we visit as totally unrelated. Search engines like Google provide a way for us to find web sites we are looking for. I'm not sure what your nationality has to do with it either.

Ron

[Techwriter10]

loganf, exactly, it's a case of 'Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.'

Thanks for the comment.

Ron

[BrianBolton]

Does anyone want to get in a bidding war with Google? Couldn't they just counter with $1.1m to stay in the index? Totally ridiculous.

[ravin_perumal]

Data flows in the direction of least resistance. Eventually the winner would be the one who is cheaper, less restrictive/simple, organic, and so on.

[torncityvenz]

If the top 1000 sites left google...would anyone notice? the answer is yes..the next 1000 that would replace them..and my guess is there are a couple that would stay in the top 1000 after getting the exposure even if the other came back.

[swiftnet]

Another rich idiot. There should be laws against things like this. Mark Cuban should just give MS 1 billion so they could make a better search engine. If you want to compete, make a better product, that is how it should be. Instead we have a rich idiot saying stuff like, let's bribe a bunch of companies to abandon the best search engine. This is the stuff that is destroying America. I feel and hope that Americans are better than this.

[Marbles]

Uh, Mark Cuban has forgotten about how to make dotcom money than you naysayers will ever know. Did you really think all he knows how to do is own a basketball team? Where do you think he got the money to buy it in the first place?

[motherjoe]

Mark Cuban is the Glenn Beck of the business world. He made his fortune of the dot come bust by being in the wrong place at the right time.

I think he comes up with this crap just to keep him self in the headlines and so people will think he has something interesting to say.

Have a nice day,
mother.....

Mark Cuban, the eccentric owner of the NBA's Dallas Mavericks, has a post in his blog this week suggesting a way to kill Google by paying the top one thousand most popular sites $1M each to leave the Google Index. He wonders if Rupert Murdoch's plan to leave the Google Index could mark the beginning of a full-scale exodus from Google, one which could be expedited with some cash payoffs from Microsoft. Now, I'm no legal expert, but it seems to me that such a ploy would not fly with the government, but for the sake of argument, let's say it would. Why would you want to wipe out Google?

Pay Me, Pay Me, Pay Me My Money Down

I'm sure Microsoft is looking for ways to choke Google. After all, that's what competitors do, but I'm not sure it's in a top web site's best interest to abandon Google, no matter how much cash is involved. If I'm getting a fair amount of traffic from Google, and I make a lot of money, would the million dollar bribe be enough to entice me to cut off that gravy train?

I suppose it's possible. After all a million dollars is not a trivial amount of money to most of us, and if it involved other enticements like placement guarantees and ad deals, it might look good. What's interesting is that the numbers involved in a scheme like this would probably not make a company like Microsoft flinch. Remember, Microsoft was ready to pay $45 billion at one point for Yahoo!.

Play Both Ends Against the Middle

Cuban's plan gets a little more interesting when he suggests that perhaps Google wouldn't stand still while its closest competitor tried to force the market away from its search engine. Maybe Google would up the stakes. After all, they have money too. Maybe the top sites could get Google into a bidding war with Microsoft, but would this be healthy for anyone except the companies that were the recipients of this largess? It probably wouldn't be great for smaller companies who wouldn't be worth the attention in a playing field that was now defined by cash payments.

Too Many Questions

But in the end, there are way too many questions left unanswered. Would Microsoft stock holders stand for this use of Microsoft cash resources in a scheme that still might not work? Would Google up the cash stakes, or more likely tie up such an approach in court for so many years that it wouldn't matter to most of us for a long, long time? Would the government stand by and watch this game without stepping in?

I'm not sure, but for me personally, I can't see the advantage of choking Google in this fashion, or if anyone would be willing to take the risk it would involve of leaving the world's most popular search engine, cash payments not withstanding. Google simply drives too much traffic and why kill the golden goose for spite?

[jahf]

If the top 101 through 1,000 sites left Google (and let's face it, the top 100 almost certainly wouldn't, as they will make more over the years than the $1M) this is what would happen: There would be a new top 101-1000 sites. Google made 1/2 of those sites successful. And they did it because Google has so many users. Until the USERS switch off Google (which will require a war of attrition) the top 100 sites will stay there. There are PLENTY of other sites waiting in the wings to get a notch up. All this plan would do is help those sites (not necessarily a bad thing).

And I have absolutely no reason, as a user, to leave Google. Even if those 900 sites disappeared. Google may be huge, but so far they have been very very good for me. Not just for search ... but Gmail, Android, Docs ... all extensible, accessible and free (I don't mind Adwords at all).

Sounds to me like Mr. Cuban is full of bluster.

[burne]

I have no clue about the American market, but one of the largest Dutch e-tailers has a turnover of around 500 million dollar. Losing 60% of the search-engine crowd in return for a mere million won't fly. Let's asume the American market is 20 times the size, on par with the differences between our respective economies. Would a large web-only e-tailer with a 10 billion dollar turnover be willing to lose 60% of searchers for a promille of their turnover, while doing nothing will give them both Bing- and Google-customers?

Mark Cuban doesn't seem to be quite the maths-wizard some people hold him for.

(please forgive any spelling- or grammar-errors, English isn't my native language..)

[bbbaldie]

Never had a reason to dislike Cuban. Attempting to help MS in their effort to control the internet? NOW I do...

[cartercole]

gee that sounds alot like what that news corp dude said he was going to do to try and help out bing... funny that google gives you a shit ton of organic traffic and bing gives you none a mil and no visitors isnt worth the money. on my blog i get about 200 visits a month from google and (drum roll) 2 from bing... bing may have some good features but it seems like finding good articles isnt one of those things. wolfahm|alpha equation solver and comparison thing is way cool but im sure google will have its own very soon (same thing with bings lame twitter search)

[boylarry]

And BEG Avery Johnson to come back and work for a mil.

[jambad]

Killing Google is not is anyones best interest, competition is. If Cuban really wants to make an impact he should start a search engine that will be committed enough to actually compete with them.

[jvishnefske]

supposedly the google bot. It will respect robot.txt, so it is possible to prevent your site from being indexed

[whatever1212]

polymath, google's search is 100% organic. all these websites selling out to mark cuban would do is add 2 lines to their robots.txt that told googlebot to not index anything. i think they can also manually request removal.

i really dont know why someone would want to help microsoft that much. google spends a ton of money paying lawyers to fight the government and other jerks for the sole purpose of protecting its user's privacy. microsoft and yahoo don't do this. i dont understand this mark cuban guy at all, except i think he's lame.

[Grant_Ed]

Do content providers (WSJ, NYT, AP etc) want to be paid for Google's use of their work? Yes.

Is $1million enough to offset the ad revenue that will be lost when Google's not driving eyeballs their way? No.

Sorry, but Cuban's math doesn't work out. At a time when all content providers work very hard to increase their Google rankings, few will deem themselves large enough to entirely exclude themselves from Google's index.

[the old rang]

The idea, with or without a 'known' connection to Microsoft, of paying people to shun a service, then using "microsoft" search tool...

Sounds like what got intel and a few other companies into courts around the world, for egregious monopolistic practices.

Neither Microsoft NOR Intel have come out of these suits uninjured.

But, Neither of them seems to have learned.

I believe in free enterprise...

THIS is not.

It is using means that have been declared illegal, and paying off both individuals, companies (and more than likely a dozen or so politicians. That I do not know for sure, but, the current crop is easily tapped, so to speak) to make sure that there is no competition in a free market.

If I needed to find porn (Bing's mainstay right now) I still would not use it. There is very little security in Microsoft's output, anywhere.( EG How many computers have been infected by only one worm, for almost a year, and Microsoft still has no fix?? and less than a million is wrong!)

So, Join the current administration, pay off whom you may, and destroy that which built this country...

Thank you very much...

[strategist]

Cuban's infamous "YouTube is doomed" screed along with his other half-baked ideas should have shunted him to anonymity by now. The only reason that he remains in the news was his incredible fortune to sell a mediocre idea at an over-the-top price.

Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while; that doesn't mean you should take advice from him!

[cannedham]

There's this little thing called anti-trust law, which Microsoft has already run afoul of with far more benevolent actions like giving away a web browser for free.

I'm pretty sure Microsoft buying exclusive index rights for the top 1000 web site would be noticed by the DoJ and EU, the states of California and New York, Apple, Verizon, Intel, and every other 10,000 lb gorilla. Buying these rights would probably get the company dismantled, if not executives thrown in jail.

Thanks, Mark Cuban, for something sensationalistic and guaranteed to be a business failure. Just like most of your ideas.

[janneke]

Okay Mark, so it seems that you know what you do not want.
Good, that's a start.

However, most often that does not get you what you do want.

So take a silent moment to ask yourself: what is it that I want?

Or get some help to figure out what you want in life.
SNIP

[nanoanon]

A slight flaw in the plan - MS and Yahoo can promise to 'drive all the traffic' they want but users will still use google thanks to earned reputation and trust. His stupid plan will do nothing to remove this reputation and trust, in fact would probably solidify it further as public opinion of the bribery would probably sink perceptions of MS and Yahoo even lower.

[Howard]

There's an subtle but important detail here: if a site owner requests that Google doesn't crawl their site, Google has to abide by that. BUT if other sites on the web link to the site that's no longer crawled (which is clearly the case for popular sites), Google is still able to return search results for the "no crawl" site. It can no longer use the content on the site itself to determine search relevance (since it can't crawl the pages), but if the anchor text and links are sensible, these are likely to be good enough for Google to figure out the "no crawl" result should be ranked high.

Net result: the "no crawl" sites still end up at the top of the search results, but there will be no page snippets shown with the result, just a bare bones URL. But that would be enough for the "plan" to fail.

[rojoloco]

This idea makes no sense whatsoever.

"by paying the top one thousand most popular sites $1M each to leave the Google Index"

Presumably, the top one thousand websites are the ones making good money. So 1M for them is not that much. Not enough for them to be bribed to leave the Google index or making any other ridiculously stupid moves.

[the old rang]

on thing most in this discussion seem to forget, many of the 'top 1,000' pay for the title. Unless you did not know, search engines are supported by two things. Advertisers, and fees paid by sites for 'preferred' (for lack of a better name) placement in search results. (free enterprise(??) again. That is why, sometimes you had to go to the second page to find what really was a match.) I am not sure what the fees are, or other stipends, but, after years of using search tools, I know an exact match to my exact search may not be close to page one, but listed. You should have noted this a while ago. I did, years ago.

The REALLY good search engines died, because they either did not do this soon enough, or were bought out by the ones that did. The best one (my opinion) was bought out by Yahoo! and now is gone. (alltheweb.com) It replaced another that was really kind of on your own system (WebFerret). I miss both of them, because both were better than things today. They didn't have name recognition, but, were much better with less web, at finding ANYTHING.

So, If Mr Cuban's plan is going to work, he has to overcome the 'sites' own desires for getting what they already know works, and what THEY pay for, because it does.

Kind of a sell, unless they figure their revenue were mis-spent, and didn't get them the $1,000,000, that he is offering, in web traffic/sales.

Sites that would be most tempted to do that, would be ready to go under, anyway, and would be a bad investment, on Mr. Cuban's part.