Thursday, Dec 3, 2009    Text size: 

Earlier this month, the publishing titan threatened to remove his many website from Google's search index because it allows users to access paid content for free. Murdoch's sites include the Wall Street Journal, MySpace.com, Hulu.com, Fox.com and AskMen.com.

The threat was simultaneously a shot fired across Google's bow and a shot in the arm for its chief competitor, Microsoft's upstart search engine, Bing.

Why? Because if Murdoch's news empire were to abandon Google, it might spark a massive exodus from Google to Bing, which would give millions of users a reason to dial up Bing every day instead of Google — and what's good for Bing is good for adult, given the search engine's overall adult-friendly stance.

Bing video search has emerged as one of the best adult search tools on the planet, and Microsoft added a porn-specific subdomain at Explicit.Bing.net to help system administrators easily filter out adult content. Since its May launch, Bing has grown about 1.3 percent, laying claim to 9.3 percent of search engine traffic.

But Google's not done yet. In response to Murdoch's threat, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company dispatched CEO Eric Schmidt to write an op-ed piece that says Google wants to work with news outlets to help monetize their content.

Now publishers can configure their sites so that surfers who arrive through Google News can only get five free clicks per day. After that, they'll encounter a login prompt that will force them to pay for the content.