Microsoft and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. are discussing a deal to give Microsoft's Bing search engine exclusive rights to deliver search results and news pages from News Corp. publications, including The Wall Street Journal. Under the plan, Microsoft would pay News Corp. to block Google from indexing the media company's news websites. The idea is to help Bing chip away at Google's dominance, and give Murdoch's newspapers desperately needed income. But is declaring war on Google suicide? (Watch a report about Rupert Murdoch's proposed deal with Bing)
The search-engine war could revive newspapers: "Rupert Murdoch just may have stumbled onto a way to save the newspaper business," says Eric Savitz in Barron's. If the News Corp. CEO makes a deal with Microsoft's Bing, and Microsoft can get more publishers to remove their sites from Google's search index, newspaper content will suddenly have much greater value than it has today.
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