Murdoch, Bing and Google

Rupert Murdoch is reported to be considering a partnership with the Microsoft Bing search engine, giving it exclusive rights to publish articles from his News Corp group of newspapers online.

Murdoch is apparently frustrated with the manner in which Google distributes content from his publications, gaining benefit while giving little to News Corp in return.

Analysts are divided about the wisdom of such a move.
Around ¼ all traffic to the Sun and many other News Corp online papers come via Google, and many industry experts however believe that this is a big mistake.

Would searchers really change their search behaviour because Murdoch's articles can not be found via Google or will they simply click on the content that is available.  It could be good for Bing but maybe not so good for News Corp. Bing only receives around 4% of UK searches.

Would the consumer lose out? Less news would be available to those who choose to stay with Google, perhaps because they are unaware of Bing and this exclusivity deal.

What is Wolfram|Alpha?

A new product from Mathematica, WolframAlpha is a new addition to the world of search, but is not in direct competition with Google, Bing, Yahoo or the other major engines, as it works in a very different way. Therefore, it should not be a factor in any SEO strategies at the moment.

Like Mathematica - an online computation system used for many scientific and engineering industries, it is a useful for highly technical questions.

For example, if you were to ask a normal search engine a question such as:
"uncle's uncle's brother's son" you would get SERPs that contain those words, whereas, WolframAlpha could compute this family tree relationship and return a blood relationship fraction - 3.125% for this example.

More information on 'Alpha':
- SERPs on Alpha will include a link to sources used for computations
- if a fact was disputed, Alpha would mention this in its footnotes
- it will feature advertisements in a sidebar
- toolbars will be released for FireFox and Internet Explorer
- it will display results from major search engines - Google, Bing, Yahoo! - and include links to any Wikipedia pages that are relevant.