Reports suggest Microsoft is courting European publishers for some sort of Bing-based news thing. Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch continues to shake his fist at Google. Cory Doctorow connects the potential dots at Boing Boing:

So here's what I think it going on. Murdoch has no intention of shutting down search-engine traffic to his sites, but he's still having lurid fantasies inspired by the momentary insanity that caused Google to pay him for the exclusive right to index MySpace (thus momentarily rendering MySpace a visionary business-move instead of a ten-minutes-behind-the-curve cash-dump).

So what he's hoping is that a second-tier search engine like Bing or Ask (or, better yet, some search tool you've never heard of that just got $50MM in venture capital) will give him half a year's operating budget in exchange for a competitive advantage over Google.

Toss in the growing idea that Twitter, Facebook and other recommendation-based results are now more important than Google traffic and we've got a very interesting set of signals.