Here's a quote from Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft's senior vice president in charge of online audiences:

What I would say is, our focus is on improving the user experience and driving our differentiation of user intent and decision-making. It's not to necessarily pay people to de-index our competition. That's not our focus. So, I wouldn't think of it that way. It's more about how do we build a better experience for people. If there's a way to share in the economics of search in that, then we're game to do that.

Note that this isn't exactly a denial, nor is it exactly a confirmation. Mehdi says paying people to delist from Google is "not our focus," but that doesn't mean they won't do it. It doesn't mean they will, either—matter of fact, it doesn't mean much of anything. Hopefully we get a clarification soon so we know exactly what "not our focus" means. [TechFlash]

This started when Microsoft and Google paid for access to Twitter's millions of tweets and Bing paid Facebook and Twitter for access to their pages. Think about this perspective, if you ran Fox the WSJ and other major content makers, wouldn't you think that your content is worth more than all those 140 character posts? Right, you would. And if those sites are charging 100s of millions and up, for their content, wouldn't you ask for a lot more? You probably would, and if you're Murdoch, the most powerful man in media, you'd probably get what you want. Pulling out of Google would be just another part of Murdoch setting up his paywall. But it's going to set a nasty precedent for the rest of the short tail of mega media companies to get a lot of Google's cash. Maybe a lot of these companies value Google's help in promoting their stuff, but it never hurts to ask for money, especially when media and publishing are super duper hard up on cash these days, in general. I'm not an investor in big media or any tech companies, so its not a problem to me, in that way. But it is a problem to me as a guy who lives and works through search engines.

Microsoft is just being evil again. Now, this isn't typical Microsoft bashing — someone has to fight Google. And in a way, you have to hand it to Microsoft. They're the underdog here fighting a Google that grows in power every day, and their Facebook content deal won't likely be matched by Google any time soon. But this is so typically Bad Microsoft, because they've cleverly short cut the straightforward fight for marketshare by features and gone for a deal-based solution to the problem. Like the PC and OS fight in the 80s they're competing with business tactics instead of quality. (And Bing is great, so I'm not making a complete 1:1 comparison to Windows.) We're sort of left with—instead of a David and Goliath—a Clash of the Titans situation with pieces of rock and lighting falling from the sky and crushing us. Microsoft fails to see/care that the fragmentation that Microsoft is trying to achieve is not only going to hurt Google — it is going to hurt YOU AND ME.

This is the Microsoft we know from the last century, before great underdog products like Xbox and Zune. This is from a company who's CEO recently told us that sales are more important than critical acclaim, preferring profit over better product. And this is a company that gets in its anticompetitive digs when it can: For example, in Internet Explorer, it's really hard to set Google as your default browser, not being listed in the alternative choices to Bing. Yet, in Google Chrome, it's easy to set Bing as the default search.

Again, imagine that half of the top 500 media companies are delisted from Google. And imagine that Google stoops to this strategy and buys out the other half of that 500. Now imagine you have to search for something and now have to type it in twice because who the fuck is going to remember (no one) which search engine covers which content? *

People, I'm telling you, this is bad news. People talk about net neutrality like it's only about the data's prioritization over the pipes. But what good is equivalence in data speed and prioritization if you can't find it in the first place?

*the fix for all this is that we'll use search engine aggregators, which is just another layer of bullshit to sort through.

News organizations are in complete control over whether and how much of their content appears in search results. Publishers put their content on the web because they want it to be found, so very few choose not to include their material in Google News and web search. But if they tell us not to include it, we don't. If publishers want their content to be removed from Google News specifically all they need to do it tell us.

How can they say that? I really can't begin to imagine the despair and sadness that will engulf me the day Fox News and The New York Post disappear from Google. Just. Can't. [AFP]

Apparently Murdoch is under the impression that readers who come into his vast media empire (which includes Sun, The Times, The Wall Street Journal, FOX News/movies/channel, MySpace, and I-don't-even-remember-what-else) through Google aren't going to lead to any sort of profit:

If they're just search people... They don't suddenly become loyal readers.

As those "search people" are worthless, they can be ignored and blocked in Murdoch's world. He explains that there the only way to actually make any money on the Internet today is to charge for all content and force users to access it directly, because otherwise "no news websites or blog websites anywhere in the world making serious money."

On one hand, good luck with cutting off one of the most used paths to any online content and then expecting a check, Rupe. On the other, if Twitter can charge Bing and Google for indexing rights, shouldn't one of the world's most powerful content creators be able to? [Business Insider]

More ominously, while revealing the paid app switcheroo at a Goldman Sachs conference, Rupert Murdoch also predicted a pay-per-view or subscription model for Hulu. (His News Corp. owns the WSJ, and partners with NBC Universal on Hulu.) Yikes. [paidContent via Editorialiste]

The statement, gleaned and confirmed by AllThingsD's Peter Kafka, is a surprise to everyone, and wasn't accompanied by many real details. A crucial fact here is the News Corp isn't designing an eBook reader; they're investing in a company that makes them. Kafka puts forward a few possible names, including Plastic Logic and Hearst, but both of their planned products are said to be black-and-white only.

Fujitsu has a color reader on the market already, but it's of a different breed than Murdoch seems to be talking about, with 260k colors and an exorbitant $1000+ price tag. We'll have to wait and see on this one, but probably not for too long—this is a guy who, for better or for worse, means what he says—and the Kindle is begging for some decent competition. [AllThingsD]

According to Reuters, the service will be a combination of Google News and Digg, both aggregating the most popular news stories around the Web and adding "a social element to traditional news consumption by giving readers the ability to determine what becomes the top news on MySpace." In other words, in spite of there being 25 categories and 300 subcategories, it still might end up "all K-Fed, all the time." If it does, you have only the kids to blame.

Something is definitely going on. Follow the jump to see what happened when visited news.myspace.com.

By a not terribly wild guess, we determined that the URL of the new site will be news.myspace.com. This morning, the following dialog box confirmed our guess:

Keep checking that URL, because the MySpace News beta may start today. Just remember, News Corp. didn't make its name by giving people the news; it made it by selling ads. The more you participate in MySpace, the more exciting you will be to advertisers. That, according to the story, is Murdoch's main motivation. If you don't think you're being targeted, pay attention to the word "target" in the following quote:

"Many advertisers have expressed interest in the service, which allows them to target the MySpace community in a more direct way," Brian Norgard, co-founder of Newroo, a company purchased by News Corp. last year, which created MySpace News' technology, said in an interview.

Go ahead, it's okay to sell your soul. All we ask is that you vote for a Gizmodo story or three each and every time you're on MySpace News. Thanks in advance. – Wilson Rothman

MySpace to test news service to boost ad revenue [Reuters]

Zucker whines that "YouTube needs to prove that it will implement its filtering technology across its online platform. It's proven it can do it when it wants to." It sounds strange, considering NBC has an official deal with YouTube, but not when you consider how wishy-washy NBC has been, pulling clips not officially uploaded by the channel.

Murdoch's criticism is more of the same old, same old: "How do you monetize it?" It's still the question du jour for sure. Then again YouTube's founders, who each walked away with over $320 million seem pretty monetized. – Matt Buchanan

NBC blasts Google's YouTube over copyright [CNET]
Murdoch the latest media mogul to take on YouTube [CNET]