Recent reports have confirmed that Microsoft Corp. recently held talks with News Corp. over paying the publisher of the Wall Street Journal to remove all its reports from Google's search engine listings. The talks are still in early stages, making News Corp. one of the several online content publishers that the technology giant has approached to remove their site results from Google, and cutting it off from sharing search results related to them.

The move has been described as a "direct assault" on Google by some, as it will pressurize the company to pay for content it wants to include in its search results.

News Corp. owners Rupert Murdoch and his son James Murdoch have already shared plans of charging for online content. In this scenario, Google will have to be cut off if the company wants only serious readers and not everyone who might end up on the website through search results. "The key step in developing a key wholesale marketplace for digital journalism is starting to ask a price”, James Murdoch shared at a recent conference. “We invest quite a lot in our journalism and we are proud of it and we think we should charge a fair price for it".

The move, if confirmed, could be a definite blow to Google, which currently holds 65.4% share of the US search engine market and is already facing competition from Microsoft's search engine Bing, and the competition might be getting stronger as Bing and Yahoo have plans of joining hands to make a bigger search engine.