Even with Microsoft pact, Murdoch can't go it alone

Give Rupert Murdoch this much: His plan to stick it to Google while simultaneously increasing his newspapers' revenues is clever. Very clever, in fact. But that doesn't mean it's good.

Murdoch is reportedly in talks with Microsoft (MSFT) about a pact whereby News Corp. (NWS) would de-index its news sites' content from Google (GOOG), making it invisible to the leading search engine, but visible to much smaller competitor Bing. To express its gratitude, Microsoft, which owns Bing, would pay News Corp. some unknown amount of money in return.