Random Scams Won't Take Down Google
Date : 15 May 2008 Category : Business
Techdirt
Three years ago, reporter Tom Foremski tossed out his idea for how Microsoft could kill Google in an underhanded way: offer $100 million to whoever clicked on a random Google ad. The trick would be that no one (other than the person administering the prize at Microsoft) would know what the ad is. Foremski's theory was that this would lead to massive clickfraud and anger from Google advertisers. Of course, there are a lot of assumptions in there that likely wouldn't hold up in a real world test (with the biggest being that the whole deal would stop working the second someone "won"). However, now we've got Mark Cuban tossing out a suggestion for how to take down Google that seems to come from the same "wishful thinking" playbook. Cuban's idea is that Microsoft (with Yahoo) should offer to pay the top 100,000 sites in Google to get them to remove themselves from Google, and agree to be "exclusively" in the Yahoo/Microsoft listing. The idea is that the money would serve to pay for the lost traffic from Google -- but that's highly speculative.
If Microsoft actually tried this, it would be quite difficult for the Justice Department not to call an antitrust foul, first of all. But, at a more practical level, it just wouldn't work. It's based on the false premise that those top 100k sites are really the only sites that matter. If they all disappeared from Google's index, another 100k would quickly fill in to replace them. In fact, it would get more and more difficult to convince sites to leave Google's index, since the competition for clicks would get easier and easier as others did leave. On top of that, if this actually did happen, my guess is Google would continue to index those sites anyway forcing some sort of court battle over whether or not a site can actually block a search engine from spidering it entirely. These sorts of ideas are fun to think about, but once you think past the basic idea, it's not hard to recognize why the scams would never work. Beating Google is never going to be about a scam.
Now, I should add that I started writing up this post last night. This morning, the news came out that Cuban is included on the board slate that Carl Icahn has put up to try to force Yahoo to sell to Microsoft. The timing, obviously, is no coincidence. Cuban's blog post went up just hours before he was revealed to be a potential board member. However, just because this could, conceivably, put Cuban in a position to actually push Microsoft/Yahoo to implement such a plan, it doesn't make it any more viable. In fact, it makes it that much more questionable.
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If Microsoft actually tried this, it would be quite difficult for the Justice Department not to call an antitrust foul, first of all. But, at a more practical level, it just wouldn't work. It's based on the false premise that those top 100k sites are really the only sites that matter. If they all disappeared from Google's index, another 100k would quickly fill in to replace them. In fact, it would get more and more difficult to convince sites to leave Google's index, since the competition for clicks would get easier and easier as others did leave. On top of that, if this actually did happen, my guess is Google would continue to index those sites anyway forcing some sort of court battle over whether or not a site can actually block a search engine from spidering it entirely. These sorts of ideas are fun to think about, but once you think past the basic idea, it's not hard to recognize why the scams would never work. Beating Google is never going to be about a scam.
Now, I should add that I started writing up this post last night. This morning, the news came out that Cuban is included on the board slate that Carl Icahn has put up to try to force Yahoo to sell to Microsoft. The timing, obviously, is no coincidence. Cuban's blog post went up just hours before he was revealed to be a potential board member. However, just because this could, conceivably, put Cuban in a position to actually push Microsoft/Yahoo to implement such a plan, it doesn't make it any more viable. In fact, it makes it that much more questionable.
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