When News Corp. mogul Rupert Murdoch suggested in November that he could block paid Wall Street Journal content from Google’s search crawlers, he unwittingly touched off a short-lived media furor. Journalists, bloggers and other pundits speculated that Murdoch could disrupt Google’s successful search ad business by making News Corp. content invisible from the world’s leading search engine. The plot thickened with rumors that Microsoft might become Murdoch’s partner-in-arms versus Google, with News Corp. letting Microsoft’s Bing search engine index its content. Roger Kay, the founder and president of Endpoint Technologies Associates, advanced the argument in a column for BusinessWeek.com published Dec. 22. eWEEK walks you through Kay’s theory here.
– …