Will News Corp. shut out Google for a Bing bribe?
There’s been a fair amount of chatter among journalism types this week about the possibility of News Corp. — whose chief executive Rupert Murdoch seems to have a visceral hatred of Google’s ability to make money off Web-search advertising — blocking Google from indexing its properties and instead letting Microsoft pay it for the privilege. As recent reports in the Financial Times and the New York Times explain, under this deal Microsoft would pay News Corp. an unspecified sum to stop Google from indexing its sites — an option the Web search giant and every other legitimate search engine has long supported — and then make its stories available through its Bing search site. Understand that I love competition and I think Bing is a pretty good search engine, but I doubt this will work for either Microsoft or News Corp. (I know Murdoch’s media properties — including Fox News, the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal — aren’t everybody’s favorite sources, but let’s set aside that
