By NYU Staff

Microsoft and Murdoch are barking up the wrong tree.

Or so says Alan D Mutter. He’s a media and technology consultant and founder of the blog Reflections of a Newsosaur. He recently mused on the news that Microsoft was in secret talks with News Corp to make Bing the exclusive search engine for News Corp content.

Here’s why Mutter thinks Rupert Murdoch’s plan won’t squash Google’s search presence in the long run — albeit with bonus points for creativity:

*Approximately half of the traffic to newspaper websites comes from search-engine referrals

*Fully 71% of the searches on the web are handled by Google, while fewer than 7% of the searches are handled by Bing

*If a newspaper generated revenues as low as $1 per thousand for banner ads on the traffic steered to it by search engines, then Microsoft would have to pay the paper more than $10 per thousand to make it worthwhile for the paper to forsake traffic from Google

Further, he says newspaper traffic can’t be all that valuable to Microsoft since Google doesn’t pay newspapers for content. While ganging up against Google, newspapers could slip further into irrelevance among readers and advertisers by denying their articles to 71% of the world’s search traffic.

This is even as AOL tries to Google-ize news, according to The Guardian. The company plans to rely on algorithms, instead of journalists in flesh and blood to determine the stories that have greatest appeal to audiences and advertisers.