Bing Ka-Ching

Over the last month I noticed a great many ‘hits’ returned by Microsoft’s bing news are not on the original ‘publisher’, but the original publisher’s article at msn.com.

With clicks being the basic currency of the internet, how brilliant is that? Some snips as examples:

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and on it goes. How clever is Microsoft! Right this way to a Microsoft product folks, right this way.

(no end to cynicism font)

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Yahoo does this as well. My wife sent me a story from Yahoo yesterday that she had just found but I had read at the source a couple of days earlier. She had no idea about the original source.

This Yahoo article appears to match this article on CBC Canada. Both credit Associated Press.

It has long been the case that an (eg) AP news, Reuters, etc items are published independently on multiple places, especially since those publishers subscribe to those news feeds. With what you posted that seems different to what Microsoft and bing are doing.

Does ‘yahoo news’ take you to an article that is ‘CBC Canada on yahoo.com’ to attract clicks and traffic, or to an original of the item itself? The yahoo site credits each item and inside the article it is attributed as well.

Using yahoo or yahoo search to find news I don’t see any that return a form like CBC Canada on yahoo.com to get traffic to yahoo, if that illustrates the difference.

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I agree, but the article my wife shared yesterday was in the same category as what you are identifying with Bing; I just couldn’t easily find a basic example.

All of that is why I have a few news sources bookmarked. I never would bother with bing or yahoo… or google, for that matter.

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