Microsoft discusses paying News Corp for search listings

The newspaper says that Microsoft has approached News Corp and other online publishers with a plan to pay them to make their content available in search listings. Microsoft hopes publishers would then agree to remove their sites from the Google News search function. The FT story follows an earlier report on TechCrunch.

News Corp boss Rupert Murdoch has said in the past that search engines such as Google are effectively stealing content, and that when the company eventually sets up a pay wall around content, it may block search engines from its sites.

While critics say that blocking Google means blocking a vast amount of web traffic, Murdoch argues that the traffic delivered by Google is not valuable to advertisers and that, in any event, there is simply not enough online advertising revenue to make such a system profitable.

Microsoft is working hard to turn its new search engine Bing into a viable competitor for Google. Access to news sites not available on Google could prove to be a winning point.

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