Techcrunch and others seem to be running with the story of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp looking to maybe cut a deal with Microsoft to allow it to carry links to its news content whilst cutting off Google.

I’m sure the folks at Google are thinking – so what.

If Microsoft and Murdoch think that this deal would suddenly drive lots of people away from Google and over to Bing I think they are showing yet another spectacular lack of understanding of how things work.

Most people use Yahoo News / Google News / MSN News etc to find out ‘what is going on now’ - they are after breaking news. They are not – as a rule – looking for ‘what’s breaking at The Sun / The Times etc. If they are interested in that then they’ll either go directly to that paper’s website or they’ll already have some sort of rss feed set up from that publication to alert them to any new content.

Microsoft/Bing would need exclusive deals with a LOT of publishers for this to have any effect what-so-ever. For the ROI, I’m not convinced that would be money well spent.