Search Engine battle will help media

By Ryan Franker

Microsoft and Google are battling it out to see which one is the best search engines out there and to see which one has the best online news. The president and CEO of Associated Press, Tom Curley, said he believes that the battling between who has the best search engine sites will bring a more profit to the media industry.

Just this past July, Microsoft decided to team up with Yahoo! and go against Google. Microsoft wanted to give Google a run for their money, on which company could dominant the online news search engine.

Curley would like to see a way of getting the money back that is being lost due to these online news search engines. He believes that Microsoft has an edge over Google, but he refused to criticize Google on the improvements that are being made to its site.

Microsoft plans on improving how reliable the news sources are, which Curley thinks it would benefit the media. The company is coming up with a new way to search. The link would be an image galleria rather than the normal text links.

He hopes this improvement is going to enhance the readers' experience of reading news online. He thinks this improvement will happen within the next three to fifteen months.

(Photo Credited: flickr)

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The Associated Press Decides to Try Selling Early, Exclusive News

By Taylor Finch

The Associated Press has pondered on the fact that having the power to give a head-start on news stories, to paying publishers, could possibly be quite lucrative.

The AP licenses out stories owned by newspapers and broadcasters to many of the Web's main portals, such as Google and Microsoft's MSN. At this time, all of these portals receive breaking-news at the same time.

In attempts to capitalize on the ongoing competition between Microsoft and Google, customers, such as Google and Microsoft, will now be able to pay for exclusive information on "certain topics" up to a half an hour earlier than the news story would break publicly.

Tom Curley, AP's chief executive, believes this would also help to give due credit to those newspapers and broadcasters that the stories and information originally belong to.

This does not sound like a bad idea, because these days, with all the Web availabilities, there is a lot of fame in being the first to flood the Internet with a top news story. Problems would arise, though, if the process of selling and publishing the news story was not completed before the same story leaked elsewhere.

Everyone will just have to see if this idea will be able to hold its own in today's fast-paced media journalism.

(Photo By: Mediabistro.com)

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