Rupert Murdoch to burst Google's bubble?
Updated on 23 November 2009
A new front opens in the global media war - Rupert Murdoch tries to burst Google's bubble, but is he living in cloud cuckoo land? John Sparks reports.
It is a battle for the future of your computer. Ever since Google became the most popular search engine in the world, Microsoft has been trying to get back into the action.
And now it is reported to be trying to hook up with one of the biggest publishers in the world - Rupert Murdoch.
Reports in the Financial Times say Microsoft is talking to Murdoch about paying him for exclusive access to his newspaper articles so people have to use Microsoft's Bing search engine to find something instead of Google.
Is it the first serious challenge to Google's dominance? Or is it consumers who should be really worried?
Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, one of the biggest publishers of content on the internet, is understood to have started talks about taking its news sites down from the market leader Google, but allowing them to be accessed on Microsoft's search engine Bing. De-Indexing is the term being used.
The move, if it comes to fruition, would start a process of putting a value on material published online and could lead to the internet search engines paying publishers to host their content.
Krishnan Guru-Murthy was joined by Robert Andrews, UK editor of the website paidContent which examines the digital media business and Ciaran Norris, head of social media at Mindshare.
