If News Breaks and Google Can't See It, Did It Happen?

If you heard Rupert Murdoch telling SkyNews' David Speers that News Corp. might make its content 'invisible' to Google earlier this month, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the chairman misspoke. Invisible—to Google? To quote the bard, "That's unpossible!"

Never underestimate the will of a mogul who thinks someone is coming between him and his money. Murdoch may be about to make the unpossible (as well as the impossible), well, possible.

Yesterday, the Financial Times' Matthew Garrahan, Richard Waters, and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson reported that News Corp. is in early talks with Microsoft about making the company's content only searchable on Bing. How this would solve the company's problems with what Wall Street Journal editor Robert Thomson colorfully dubbed "parasites or tech tapeworms in the intestines of the Internet" is unclear. Sure, Microsoft could pay News Corp. some sort of fee to index its content, but if users don't go there to find the stories—or, possibly, search MySpace or News Corp.'s other Web content—what's the point?

In potentially blocking Google in favor of Bing, News Corp. would be shifting its content from the search engine with nearly 65 percent of the market in favor of the one with just under 10 percent (per TechCrunch's number crunching). News Corp. would be lowering its own traffic and finding itself outside of Google News' story flow and archive. All that would be accomplish is sending a message to Google. FT quotes an unnamed Web publisher who says “This is all about Microsoft hurting Google’s margins."

Now that's what we call good business.

In a followup in the Wall Street Journal, Nick Wingfield and Shira Ovide quote a Google spokesperson as saying the search engine giant has a "clear policy of respecting the wish of content owners." Sounds like Google is ready to let Murdoch take his ball and go home.