For example, search for [japan] on Bing News and you will see a box on the right that says “Public updates for japan.” You can pause the stream of tweets, if you want to slow down the stream. You can also click through to read the tweet by the Twitter user directly on Twitter.com.

Finally, you can click on the “more updates” link to be taken to Bing’s Social Search results for that query.

Min-John (MJ) Lee, Senior Program Manager at Microsoft Bing news and real-time search, tweeted that this was new. He said, “@dannysullivan bing news just launched twitter tweets in news search results. (cc @sengineland).”

The Bing News search results page does look a bit cluttered and can maybe benefit from a slight redesign.

Related News:

• Bing Launches Social Search Features
• Bing Social Search Now Recommends People To Follow On Twitter
• What Social Signals Do Google & Bing Really Count?
• Bing, Now With Extra Facebook: See What Your Friends Like & People Search Results
• Bing Integrates Facebook Likes Further Into Its Search Results

The new toolbar, which is graphically more pleasing to look at than a conventional toolbar, enables users to get lots of different types of information via drop-down windows: news, weather, maps, multiple email accounts, movies, games and so on — in addition to search.

Users can obtain and interact with their Facebook feeds, for example, without going to the site. In this way it sort of borrows from Bing’s philosophy of enabling users to quickly get to information or complete tasks without having to click through or down a level to another site.

These content modules effectively operate like browser tabs and diminish the need (for some) to have 15 tabs open simultaneously.

For regular Bing users as well as non-users it’s a useful tool — so to speak. Unfortunately there’s no Mac version and it only works with IE (7 or later). On a Windows machine you need Windows 7; Windows Vista; Windows XP with Service Pack (SP) 3.

Weitz said that 12 percent of all searches happen through toolbars. However he was unaware of the precise number of Bing searches in particular happening via toolbars. Microsoft has used computer hardware OEM-toolbar distribution deals in the past as a cornerstone of its new customer acquisition strategy for Bing.

We didn’t get visibility on whether Bing toolbar users are more engaged and loyal than other types of Bing users. I would assume they are however. Bing also captures valuable clickstream data from toolbars (if permitted by users).

And now for the unpleasant part where I allude to the Google-Bing “copygate” controversy. Those who wish to revisit the claims and responses can click the links below. Now back to Bing; if I were a regular PC user I would definitely install the Bing Bar and use it. Unfortunately, however, my primary computer is a Mac.

As a final thought, someone at Microsoft ought to either buy or sponsor a local Seattle watering hole and get the owner to rename it . . . you guessed it: the “Bing Bar.”

For related stories on this across the web, see here on Techmeme. Also see below for past stories related to this topic from Search Engine Land.

Related Entries:

• Colbert: “Hiybbprqag Is A Word Meaning You Got Served”
• Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results
• Bing Admits Using Customer Search Data, Says Google Pulled ‘Spy-Novelesque Stunt’
• Bing: ‘We Do Not Copy Results. Period.’
• Google On Toolbar: We Don’t Use Bing’s Searches
• Microsoft Releases New MSN Toolbar, Now Powered By Bing
• Microsoft Launches A New Loyalty Program: Bing Rewards

There are a few other local search numbers floating around that get frequently cited. A big one is Google’s “20% of search is related to location.” This is a PC-centric estimate by Google that excludes some of the gray areas where intent can’t really be inferred. (Translated into query volume it represents billions of searches per month.) I also argue that most product searches online ultimately should be considered local since 96 percent of buying happens in stores.

What if you could lead people “from search to store”? That’s what Google is increasingly trying to do with product inventory data (embryonic) and some of its new mobile ad units.

Another popular data point sourced to Google is not an internal Google number: “One in three queries from smartphones is about where I am.” In the “telephone game” of data repetition that evolves into “one third of all mobile searches are local.”

Microsoft (Yusuf Mehdi, Dennis Glavin) at SMX Advanced earlier this year put forward the following very compelling statistic about the differences between PC search and mobile search user behavior: 70 percent of PC “query chains” (essentially search tasks) are completed in about one week while 70 percent of mobile users do so in one hour.

If search is a “lean forward” medium, then mobile search is a “run forward” medium. Mobile users are often expressing immediate interests or needs as opposed to people searching on PCs who may be doing research for later. Smartphone users in particular (now 28 percent of the US mobile population according to Nielsen) are very directed and using their devices to navigate, literally and figuratively, through the physical world. Mobile gives people an opportunity to be online and in the world at the same time.

People on mobile devices are often looking for information and assistance to help them make buying decisions as they literally move toward the point of sale. And 53 percent of the queries that people are doing (at least on Bing) are questions about things either not that far away, pretty close or right in front of them (in the case of in-store product queries).

Mobile user demand for information that can be acted on in the real world, in real-time is, well, very real. That’s what this Microsoft stat reflects. If that’s not an argument for mobile advertising in general and mobile search in particular, I don’t know what is.

Google’s 200 Factors

For several years now, Google has said that it uses more than 200 signals to rank pages. The figure has been designed to explain the complexity of deciding what pages show up first, but never as some type of “bragging” rights of having a more complicated algorithm. Schmidt: Listing Google’s 200 Ranking Factors Would Reveal Business Secrets explains more about some of the signals used.

Bing’s 1,000 Factors

In October, Bing mentioned as part of its announcement to use Facebook data to create “Liked” results that it had 1,000 ranking signals:

In Bing, we look at more than 1000 signals to try and get you the best result.

Unleash The Ranking Signals War!

Make no mistake. Bing wouldn’t put out a figure like that, 5 times the figure that Google had been citing, accidentally. Suddenly, the number of ranking signals turned into a competitive issue.

I didn’t think Google would take long to respond, writing:

Google’s long claimed that over 200 factors are used to rank its search results. Today, Bing says it uses 1,000 signals. Expect Google’s claim to rise shortly.

Google’s 1,000 Ranking Signals

It took less than a month for Google to publicly “catch up” to Bing. Speaking at Pubcon yesterday, the head of Google’s spam fighting team Matt Cutts said that Google has over 200 signals and many of them have more than 50 variations within a single factor.

Again, there’s no accident here. Take 200 signals, multiply by 50, and you’ve got a claim to having 10,000 signals — and a way to say you just didn’t suddenly “up” the number but that there were always 10,000 factors. (Note: I dropped a zero in my math, originally saying this brought Google up to 1,000 signals, matching Bing. Instead, it’s potentially shooting for a 10X figure).

In fairness, Cutts’ statement came in response to a question that our own news editor, Barry Schwartz, asked about. So it wasn’t like he had a big talking point about how Google’s ranking factors outrank Bing’s. And he said that he didn’t want to get into a “numbers game” over the issue. But then again, he did toss out the figures :)

It Really Doesn’t Matter

It’s all more funny than anything else. I don’t doubt that Google has had variations. I don’t doubt that Bing has 1,000 factors of its own. But goodness, let’s not having anyone think just having more “signals” than your competitor somehow makes for a better search engine. That’s a terrible signal to use!

First, I’ll point readers back to my post from earlier this month, Why An Exclusive Wall Street Journal (or News Corp) Deal Wouldn’t Help Bing.

I still suspect that News Corp’s most valuable news content of all its properties remains the Wall Street Journal. So what happens if the WSJ is out of Google? Nothing.

Seriously, nothing. Remember, for years the WSJ was NOT in Google, and yet Google grew just fine. Also, the WSJ seems to have been fine. Neither is crucial to each other.

What if all of News Corp goes? Well, what are we talking about? Shows like American Idol? I see a boon for unofficial sites with news about American Idol, if that happens. Just News Corp news organizations? I’ll quote from my recent interview with Josh Cohen from Google News, on that possibility of many papers pulling out of Google:

You have a number of different sources out there that are non-newspapers who are probably just ecstatic at the prospect of a lot of paywalls going up in a lot of different categories.

You know, pick a category. CNN, general interest news, for example, I’ve got to think, and I don’t know, I don’t know anything, I’ve got no insight into CNN’s thought process and maybe I’m wrong, but they probably get a ton of traffic and do a fairly healthy business on the online side of things.

Ideally, what the AP or Murdoch want is an OPEC for news. They want to control the flow of news through the pipelines they think their news cartels control. As far as they’re concerned, they (and only they) have tapped into news reservoirs that exist.

In reality, news is going to get out. Even if the cartel were solid and managed to all block Google (or another search engine), the news itself still flows.

That’s why you also hear noise from place like the AP that somehow, a damn needs to be built around those damn bloggers that are seen as hijacking the news shipments. As I explained in that same interview:

The other solution that gets floated out there, a sense that there needs to be either an improved “hot news” law or tighter restrictions on fair use, so that people cannot so easily summarize stories (such as when a blogger does highlights of a news story or when a mainstream news source summarizes a story from another mainstream publication).

Notice I mentioned how mainstream news publications also quote each other. Case in point, how the The Journal Inquirer in Connecticut has sued the Hartford Courant of plagiarism.

Another case in point? Let’s get close to home. The Financial Times broke the latest news on a Bing-Murdoch deal (TechCrunch had a similar report a week ago). Let’s say that the Financial Times was being like Murdoch, blocking its story from Google. Well…

1) I first saw the Financial Times story in a tweet from Business Insider, which wrote a summary of that story. Google (or Bing) wasn’t essential to me personally discovering this news, nor did I have to go to the Financial Times to understand essentials of the story.

2) I also saw Mathew Ingram tweet the same story, but when I tried to read it, the Financial Times declared I’d seen two stories already this month and couldn’t see more without registering.

3) Rather than register (I probably have an account, but being on my phone, I couldn’t be hassled to look it up), I searched on Google. There, I found the EXACT Financial Times article that is syndicated (almost certainly with the Financial Times’s permission) on CNN. So CNN wins my traffic on this day, not the FT.

4) But let’s say the FT somehow full locked down pesky news blogs like Business Insider and completely closed syndication. How else might I have learned about this scoop. Well, turns out the Wall Street Journal has coverage where it cites the Financial Times. Now, will Murdoch start complaining about how his publication is ripping off the FT, in the way he claims Google’s links to his own articles are somehow a ripoff (Google at least links to sources — the WSJ did NOT link to the FT?

Now to be clear, the WSJ said “according to people familiar with the matter” in the lead to its own story, which indicates that the reporters there saw the news in the FT, were actually extraordinarily nice in noting that the FT was out first with the news, but verified the same details with their own sources. So this really isn’t a ripoff case — but it IS an example of how the news that started with the FT hardly was locked down to it.

In other words, sure, there are news reservoirs. But anyone can tap into it — and competing publications (both mainstream media and news blogs), do so.

Meanwhile, Mark Cuban did a post on how smart a Bing-Murdoch deal would be. I left a comment over that dissected some of his assumption and why I don’t think they hold water:

Cuban: “They need the most popular searches in the categories they want to impact. Bing just has to corner the market on specific categories. ”

Say like shopping? Because Bing’s been doing that for about a year now, offering people cold hard cash money if they do shopping search at Bing — Bing Cashback. In hard economic times, when people nonetheless still need to buy, you’d think this should be bringing people to Bing in droves. And the marketshare growth from that? Not significantly moving the needle.

So news? News content that they will still find at Google in other ways is going to drive folks to Bing? Not convinced.

Cuban: “Or they can target to pay sites about mesothelioma and other diseases that ambulance chasers covet and pay huge dollars per click through, or other high paying PPC searches.”

Corner the market on mesothelioma sites? How do they do this? They payoff the first 10 sites listed in Google and say drop out, give up all that really valuable traffic that you’re paying nothing for, and we’ll give you 10% of that traffic (at best) plus some hushmoney that might not rival what you get off lawsuits? And by the way, when you go, there will be another 200 sites that are probably equally good to you that will move up. Because we can’t buy them all off.

Cuban: “Then consider MicroSofts first move on twitter…”

First move of what, three hours? Which gained them a non-exclusive?

Cuban: “their investment in Facebook…”

Which over the past two years has done more and more to open itself, and its content, up to … Google. Because you know, the walled garden still finds itself needing external traffic.

Cuban: “Which makes the public positions of AP and Reuters and other top news sites all the more interesting. One thing they all have in common ? They dont like the way google has treated them and they all need money.”

The AP has a deal with Google. They liked how Google was treating them when they cut that deal, well enough. They don’t like Google now simply because, it seems, they want to negotiate more money now that the deal is up for renewal

As for Reuters, president Chris Ahearn said in August that he believes in the link economy. No threats at Google at all. Instead, he blamed news organizations with problems on “Incumbent business leaders in news haven’t been keeping up.”

If AP pulls out of Google, I suspect Ahearn will be happy to take the traffic. If the WSJ goes, I think the NY Times will be happy to take that traffic.

Cuban: “Many, like Henry Blodgett on Silicon Insider correctly make the point that news from de-listed sites will eventually find its way on to other sites and into the Google Index. But after how long ? Without question there will be a lag time. Which may be all that MicroSing needs. You can get ALL the news you need on Bing NOW, or you can wait for it on Google.”

Well, maybe a few minutes? If that. Right now, Google’s indexing seems to routinely beat Bing’s. So let’s say the WSJ goes out with a story, something exclusive, and totally only reported out the WSJ.

Bing might take 30 minutes to show that story. Meanwhile, some news blog sees the story about 1 minute after it appears. They blog it. Google picks them up 1 minute later after they ping Google. So now Google’s 28 minutes ahead.

But hey, Google’s got a Twitter deal too, right? So you see the WSJ article. You tweet it. It shows up in Google within seconds.

Also remember that most of the WSJ (and News Corp content overall, for that matter), is NOT unique content. So Bing has to get ALL the major news organizations to play — and face facts, some of them aren’t upset with Google and figure they can monetize the traffic.

Also remember that much of the traffic to news sites isn’t off the breaking news but off queries over time. If you’re searching for a particular topic, it may be a key article that is listed in “regular” Google that’s generating visits. Pull out of Google, there’s another article there to serve the audience with a non-time sensitive need.

Cuban: “Google already has a problem in that they do a horrible job of blocking spam in their date sorted results. Removing valid results is going to make their date sorted results look even worse”

Which is why in news search, date sorting isn’t the default. Relevancy sorting is. And personally, in news search, I haven’t seen this spam problem of which you speak. If you’re talking blog search, different story (and largely non-issue given the low usage there). And when I date sort news stories for “murdoch” in Bing and Google, both seem just fine to me.

Next, just a few ironies that I tweeted about all this:

irony. murdoch pulls news corp from google. people using The Sun search powered by google can’t find news corp content

irony. murdoch pulls news corp from google. people using The Sun search powered by google can’t find news corp content

See, several News Corp sites offer Google search on those sites. If Murdoch pulls his content from Google, then he pulls his sites out of the Google results on his own sites.

Of course, he could eventually cut similar deals with Bing. And maybe he’ll restrict the use of things like Google Maps by various Fox affiliates and try to block all things Google from being used by News Corp.

Of course, as I also tweeted:

be fun if google blocked all news corp IP addresses from searching for “free” on google when researching stories, too

As my Do Newspapers Owe Google “Fair Share” Fees For Researching Stories? post explains, Murdoch’s news organizations regularly tap into Google search to research stories, unless they are somehow NOT like practically everyone else who searches. I’ve talked with plenty of News Corp reporters (from The Times, from the Wall Street Journal, from Fox News) who I personally know have used Google to research.

Will Murdoch declare Google verboten? Or what will he do if Google decides to block his sites. I doubt they would, but they could.

The could get by with Bing, of course. Perhaps they’d get by just as well. But his rank-and-file reporters probably wouldn’t want to.

Meanwhile, let’s also remember that virtually all major newspapers in Belgium opted-out of Google a few years ago. They sued to get out, rather than just using a super easy voluntary system. That’s because, in my view, the lawsuit was more about hopes trying to force Google to the bargaining table to include the papers for a fee

Instead, Google conceded and dropped the papers. Down the line, the papers effectively came crawling back asking to be reincluded. Belgian Papers Back In Google; Begin Using Standards For Blocking has more. So is News Corp’s content more valuable to Google than that of an entire country? Maybe we’ll see.

Also remember that just as Bing can do deals, so can Google. If Murdoch’s publications go bye-bye, Google might do a deal with competitors, say the New York Times. Murdoch will be gambling that Bing will pay him enough money to make up for the lost traffic. The New York Times might be gambling that the extra traffic would help cement their place in a new future, especially as they can always do a paywall and still be listed in Google as well.

Maybe we’ll see, if this all plays out.

Lastly (for now, I may update other thoughts later), I think it’s a really poor move for Microsoft to be trying to strike exclusive deals like this. It’s one thing to license content. It’s another to apparently overtly suggest that a competitor be denied that content.

Microsoft has a bad anti-competitive reputation. It’s also in the middle of trying to convince regulators both in the US and Europe that it should be allowed to purchase Yahoo’s search technology and effectively end Yahoo’s role as a search provider, leaving the space to just Google and Microsoft.

So a deal to lockout Google? You can bet Google will use this to argue to anyone and everyone that Microsoft is back to “old tricks.”

As I said, I’ll try to revisit this in a more comprehensive, coherent manner in the near future. Also see these past posts that provide more background and perspective:

• Would Someone Please Explain To News Corp How Google Works?
• Josh Cohen Of Google News On Paywalls, Partnerships & Working With Publishers
• Google’s News Experiments & The Quest To Solve The “Read State” Issue

Be sure to also see Techmeme for related coverage.

From his post today, Jason writes:

I put forth a simple strategy for Microsoft to pursue with Bing in which they would go to content providers like the New York Times or Wall Street Journal and offer them 50% more revenue then they are currently getting from Google search referrals to be exclusively indexed in Bing….

So, for a moment, imagine a world where Bing could say in their TV commercials:

“Want to search the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today and 3,894 other newspapers and magazine?”

“Well, then don’t go to Google because they don’t have them!”

“Go to Bing, home of quality content you can trust!”

OK, it’s a busy day for me, so I’m going to ramble a lot of off-the-cuff stuff that still ought to toss a big bucket of cold water on Jason’s high hopes. And I look forward to comments from anyone who wants to pull harder numbers together for some of the stuff I’m mentioning.

First, the AP has already dropped hints recently it wants to do the same thing, at least give one of the major search players an advance on stories. Maybe it can sell Bing on that idea. We’ll see. Google’s not blinking so far. If anything, Google CEO Eric Schmidt suggested last month that the AP has an inflated view of how valuable it is. From my live-blogging of his remarks in a meeting with reporters:

I want to distinguish betwen what you think your content is worth and what it’s worth [laughs all around]. We’re not going to use the price you think as a signal in the results.

Now let’s take your 50% more on search referrals idea. So Bing will offer to pay the Wall Street Journal 50% more than the ZERO Google currently pays for millions of referrals it sends the Wall Street Journal and other newspapers each day right now?

These newspapers don’t pay to be in Google’s editorial listings. They get tons of traffic from Google for free. What you really mean is that perhaps they could hope to convince Bing to pay them if they block Google from having their stories (and really, a headline link and short summary of their stories, not the stories themselves) in return for a gamble that Bing will send them either as much traffic or less traffic but more revenue.

OK, Jason, what’s that check that Bing needs to write to the WSJ? I don’t know how much traffic the WSJ gets per day from Google — for free. But we can take Compete for a starting point. It says the WSJ gets 12 million visitors per month, with 11% of those coming from Google –  about 1 million visitors per month. That feels low to me, but it’s in line with what some UK papers get.

Bing’s got about 10% of the search share; Google 70%. That’s from usage stats, by the way, not from stats based on actual traffic sent to sites. In that, Google’s much higher. Mahalo has stats — bet you’re in the 80% of all search traffic range from Google, aren’t you?

So right now, Bing’s about 1/7th the size of Google, if I’m doing my math right. Murdoch could do his deal with Bing as you suggest and thus lose his 1 million visitors in exchange for just over 150,000.

OK, so what’s the value of those remaining 850,000 million visitors? Remember, Murdoch’s also talking that he doesn’t mind a smaller audience if it’s one that pays. But those 150,000 million from Bing aren’t going to be paying. They’ll be just like people who come from Google now, needing to get free access to the Wall Street Journal at least for the first story they click through from or otherwise becoming very annoyed at Bing for sending them smack into a paywall.

Also, it’s not really an 850,000 visitor difference we’re talking about. I mean, Bing exists right now. It should already be sending 150,000 people to the Wall Street Journal, if we work off a direct proportion to what we guess Google already sends now (and that’s very rough work). Really, doing the Bing deal as you suggest doesn’t give the WSJ a net gain. It just potentially cuts off those 1 million people from Google.

So what are those people worth? What’s the amount Bing needs to pay to make up for all that lost traffic? Are they worth $0.50 per day – (or $15 per month; $180 per year)? That’s about $180 million per year Bing needs to pay just to the WSJ alone to guarantee they’re not losing that $0.50 per day, per person, that they might be earning. Maybe they earn a lot less; quite possibly, they earn more.

And that’s just to pay the WSJ, right? What about all the other papers that want to put their hands out? Does the New York Times get the same deal? It’s not hard to get up to 1/2 billion in money to license the right to link people to content on the news providers web sites, all in the hopes that this will make your search engine overall THAT much more compelling that Google overall.

No, I don’t think that makes sense for Bing todo. Keep in mind that most people at Google do NOT go to Google News. Stats from last year from Hitwise put Google News at 1% of Google’s overall traffic. Also go back and look again at those Compete stats for the WSJ. Bing’s portal partner MSN and Yahoo both send the WSJ more traffic already than Google. There’s almost certainly a licensing deal in place, and it clearly doesn’t seem to be generating enough revenue to make Murdoch declare that the war for payment in online is over.

Maybe Bing would see some growth, which would send it more traffic, which would mean the minimum revenues it needs to pay the member papers would be less. But I doubt it would be much.

Moreover, there are paid subscription services that you can tap into right now that give you the ability to search and read content from a variety of newspapers and magazines. They clearly aren’t that compelling to the majority of searchers out there.

Also, how much of the WSJ is vital information that absolutely cannot be found in other sources? Even the WSJ knows that much of what it has isn’t unique. They do have great content — I know, I actually take the print version and read it usually each day. But on a day I skip it, I’m hardly out of the loop newswise.

So you ask in your post, What’s the percentage chance I think Bing will do as you suggest? About 1%.

The reality is that the Wall Street Journal execs seem to be leading a charge against Google without really knowing where they are going or what they want. They already get lots of traffic plus get to have a paywall, thanks to First Click Free at Google. And yet, Murdoch doesn’t seem to know exactly how that operates or how Google indexes his paper. His managing editor Robert Thomson gets confused about font sizes and how Google News works. I get the impression both of them are good at talking but don’t know the actual realities of their traffic situation in relation to Google. Or they know it well but are happy to ignore it.

So why are they talking so much? At best I can tell, they seem to want a licensing deal similar to what the AP, the AFP and a few other services get. Perhaps they’ll even get it, and if so, I imagine it would be on the order of 10s of millions, not hundreds of millions. And the smaller papers out there won’t get it, as I’ve written before (see Garlic For The Google Vampire). They’re not “must carry” publications. Murdoch may sound like he’s speaking for the industry but really, he seems to be speaking to strike his own particular deal.

But hey, let’s assume they do a deal in the end. Let’s say the AP does one, too, where they withhold information from Google completely or for a set period of time. Are both publications going to stop using Google? No. And if they’re not, who’s going to start talking about how hypocritical they are? It’s fine for them both to have literally hundreds of reporters each day using Google to mine information for their web sources, something that’s free for them to do? (See Do Newspapers Owe Google “Fair Share” Fees For Researching Stories for more on this). Or are they going to start paying research fees to Google, so it can in turn redistribute those fees out to the millions of resources it currently carries — upon which they currently depend?

Finally, let me end on that trust thing. I know that lots of people who post and blog on the web have a growing mistrust of Google. But ordinary people still seem to trust it, a lot. Survey after survey shows it as a top brand. And in a time when search results between the major search engines aren’t that different, what’s the key element Google has over its rivals?

It’s trusted. It is a trusted friend that diligently serves millions who use it each day. Your ad campaign of how Bing could say it’s the home of “quality content?” People already think they’ve got that at Google. I don’t see it flying.

Postscript: From Hitwise, some statistics. According to them, both Google overall and Google News send more traffic to the Wall Street Journal than any other site, 25% combined.

Postscript 2 (Nov. 22, 2009): Since this was written, we’ve had more news that News Corp is being enticed by Bing. See:

• Badda Bing! Microsoft woos newspapers by funding their stick to beat Google
• Microsoft and News Corp eye web pact

The first is from TechCrunch about a week ago; the second from the Financial Times today. And before things get spinning that this was all Jason Calacanis’s idea — while I like Jason, he used to work for Jonathan Miller, who heads digital for the Wall Street Journal. Suffice to say, I think News Corp is putting out a lot of trial balloons — I suspect Miller mentioned this idea to Jason, who in turn put it out there. I highly doubt in the space of two weeks that News Corp said “get me Microsoft; this sounds like a plan. Or vice-versa.

I suspect that News Corp’s most valuable content of all its properties remains the Wall Street Journal. Google operated just fine for years when the WSJ wasn’t included. I highly doubt this would hurt them. That’s especially so because, as even the WSJ has acknowledged in the past, people can locate other sources for the news they report.

Also, it’s noteworthy that virtually all major news publications in Belgium a few years ago opted-out of Google (absurdly suing to get out, rather than using voluntary systems). The lawsuit was more about hopes to blackmail Google into paying the papers to be included. Instead, Google conceded and dropped them. And down the line, the papers effectively came crawling back asking to be reincluded. Belgian Papers Back In Google; Begin Using Standards For Blocking has more. Whether News Corp’s content is more valuable to Google than that of an entire country’s remains to be seen.

Finally, it’s an extremely odd move to me for Microsoft to be trying to strike exclusive deals like this. It’s one thing to license content. It’s another to try and suggest that a competitor be locked out. Microsoft has a terrible anti-competitive reputation. It’s also trying to convince regulators in the US and Europe that it should be allowed to acquire Yahoo’s search technology, because that will — it argues — make a better competitor to Google. You can expect that Google will use an anti-competitive partnership with News Corp as a sign of arguing that Microsoft is “back to its old tricks” to pressure against such a deal.

See also these past posts, that provide more background and perspective:

• Would Someone Please Explain To News Corp How Google Works?
• Josh Cohen Of Google News On Paywalls, Partnerships & Working With Publishers
• Google’s News Experiments & The Quest To Solve The “Read State” Issue

Postscript 3: See Assorted Thoughts On A “Killer” Bing-News Corp Deal, which incorporates some of my previous postscript with additional comments.

Late last week I wrote about how each of the major search engines handled the extraordinary search activity that followed the deaths of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett on the same day. Yahoo is in a unique situation as an actual content provider with writers and editors, and some of those staffers were called in from home to help Yahoo cover the breaking news. The chart above suggests the effort was worth it.

But perhaps the big winner on the day was TMZ, the entertainment site that first broke the news of Jackson’s death. Hitwise says TMZ traffic hit a three-year high on Thursday, with 5x more visits than the day before.

To start getting news in your inbox from Live Search, go to Live Search News. Then, click on where it says “News alerts” and a menu will open up. You will need a Windows Live login and then you specify the email alerts you want. Here is a picture:

A little over a week ago Microsoft launched Live Search News, and one of the biggest feature requests off the bat was an RSS option. 9 days later, Microsoft has added the RSS icon to all the pages, including the home page, category pages, and news search result pages. It is important to note that the pages are not auto-discovering RSS, so you will need to copy the RSS URL for each of your subscription requests.

Danny has additional information on Live Search News from last week.

Here’s an example of the links, which judging from how the post is tagged on the Live Search blog, might be called “deep links” by the team internally:

Finally, LiveSide posts about the arrival of Live Search products (which I thought already existed). This is a dedicated comparison engine; however, Live Search has been showing product images and reviews for some time.