Will the Microsoft-Murdoch Conspiracy Work?

Thanksgiving has come and gone, and all thoughts inevitably return to the much-hyped—and still unconfirmed—rumor that Microsoft (MSFT) has cut a deal with News Corp (NWSA) to ban Google's (GOOG) spybots from scanning Rupert Murdoch's news sites for content and headlines. Since most business and tech press reporters are painfully aware of Google's impact on the media's business model, we don't suppose they'd be preoccupied with anything else.

So, to the eternal question: Will it work? Information Week contributor Dave Methvin doesn't think so and argues that even if it does, the purity of search will be dismayingly diluted. One of Google's great advances was dispensing with the old pay-to-play regime in search engines, in which companies would essentially bribe Yahoo, et al, to boost their search rankings. If the reported Bing-Murdoch deal goes through, he claims, the news would no longer be triaged according to the combination of popularity and importance that we see today on Google News.

"Search engines will no longer represent impartial seekers of content, but will return results driven by the business partnerships and payments they've received," Methvin writes.

On the other hand, Motley Fool writer Rich Smith thinks that if other media outlets bite the bullet and say no to Google News, we could see a new market being established, in which search engines bid for the rights to index news stories and finally produce a model whereby online media pays for itself. This is particularly important in the business press, he argues: "Unless the Newsies find a solution to their profit-poor problem, the entire industry will most likely fail. If that happens, investors like you and me will have no independent fact checkers out there to help de-spin the corporate spin machine. We'll be reduced to playing Press Release Bingo, trusting in the kindness of corporate strangers, and hoping to find accuracy in the puffery. ... Strange as it sounds to hear myself saying this: This time, Rupert Murdoch fights on the side of the angels, and Google is the devil."

Amid all the back and forth, Silicon Alley Insider highlights an intriguing AP story that claims all this breathless speculation is useless. Because Microsoft isn't really going to pay News Corp to block Google; rather, this is all a bluff to spook Google, while the software company negotiates a slightly different model to showcase news stories more dramatically than Google does. "Even if it were willing to pay for exclusive indexing rights to some newspapers, Microsoft then would have to spend heavily to make sure Web surfers knew Bing had stuff that Google didn't—and even that might not be enough to get people to break their Google habit," writes AP reporter Michael Liedtke. "Even publishers who are thinking about limiting Google's access to some newspapers realize it probably would be counterproductive to cut all ties with a search engine that is so pivotal in Internet navigation."