TV Guide wants to be the new leader in video search. In announcing the product, Eileen Murphy, TV Guide’s senior vice president for corporate communications, was quoted in MediaPost as touting her company’s “good relationships with many of the sites they’ll be scraping” as a point of strength to the product.
At least on one level, TV Guide’s reference to “good relations” looks like a reference to—and swipe at—Google, which does not have good relations with, say, Viacom. And the reference raises an interesting question in our synergistic age, in which there’s a thin line between acting as a search engine and hosting (or stealing) information, as YouTube has shown. (For more on that thin search/hosting line, see an article on the topic by Did-it’s Mark Simon.)
The question is: are we moving into a new age for search engines, in which algorithms and technology are just part of the picture—the rest of the picture being relationship management with the engines’ sources of information?
