A senior Microsoft executive seemed to dismiss the likelihood that it would pay newspaper owners to remove their content from Google.
Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s senior vice-president for online services, refused to comment directly on talks with News Corp, but said that Bing was not looking to get a leg-up on Google by securing preferential access to information.
“That’s not at all a focus for us,” he said, adding: “We generally are not focused on getting non-Google content.”
He also said that keeping information off Google was “not the thing that would be a benefit to us in the long run”.
His comments come a week after it emerged that Microsoft held talks with News Corporation over plans that could see the Rupert Murdoch-owned company being paid to stop its newspaper content being indexed by Google.
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