This started when Microsoft and Google paid for access to Twitter’s millions of tweets and Bing paid Facebook and Twitter for access to their pages. Think about this perspective, if you ran Fox the WSJ and other major content makers, wouldn’t you think that your content is worth more than all those 140 character posts? Right, you would. And if those sites are charging hundreds of millions for their content, wouldn’t you ask for a lot more? You probably would, and if you’re Murdoch, the most powerful man in media, you’d probably get what you want and then set a nasty precedent for the rest of the short tail of mega media companies to get a lot of Google’s cash. Maybe a lot of these companies value Google’s help in promoting their stuff, but it never hurts to ask for money, especially when media and publishing are super duper hard up on cash these days, in general. I’m not an investor in big media or any tech companies, so its not a problem for me necessarily in that way. But it is a problem for me as a guy who lives and works through search engines.

Microsoft is just being evil again. Now, this isn’t typical Microsoft bashing – someone has to fight Google. And in a way, you have to hand it to Microsoft. They’re the underdog here fighting a Google that grows in power every day, and their Facebook content deal won’t likely be matched by Google any time soon. But this is so typically Bad Microsoft, because they’ve cleverly shortcut the straightforward fight for market share by features and gone for a deal-based solution to the problem. Like the PC and OS fight in the ’80s they’re competing with business tactics instead of quality. (And Bing is great, so I’m not making a complete 1:1 comparison to Windows.) We’re sort of left with – instead of a David and Goliath – a Clash of the Titans situation with pieces of rock and lighting falling from the sky and crushing us. Microsoft fails to see/care that the fragmentation that Microsoft is trying to achieve is not only going to hurt Google – it is going to hurt YOU AND ME.

This is the Microsoft we know from the last century, before great underdog products like Xbox and Zune. This is from a company whose CEO recently told us that sales are more important than critical acclaim, preferring profit over better product. And this is a company that gets in its anticompetitive digs when it can: For example, in Internet Explorer, it’s really hard to set Google as your default browser, not being listed in the alternative choices to Bing. Yet, in Google Chrome, it’s easy to set Bing as the default search.

Again, imagine that half of the top 500 media companies are delisted from Google. And imagine that Google stoops to this strategy and buys out the other half of that 500. Now imagine you have to search for something and now have to type it in twice because who the f—k is going to remember (no-one) which search engine covers which content?

People, I’m telling you, this is bad news. People talk about net neutrality like it’s only about the data’s prioritisation over the pipes. But what good is equivalence in data speed and prioritisation if you can’t find it in the first place?

The Financial Times reports that both companies have discussed the idea, though talks are still at an early stage. It’s also hard to imagine Bing becoming the exclusive place to search for News Corp content – like the Wall Street Journal – any time soon. As soon as a smaller blog links to a News Corp story, it’ll be straight back on Google. The “new” search wars have well and truly begun. [Financial Times via Business Insider]

Wolfram Alpha will still live on as a standalone site, since Microsoft is just licensing their search API for Bing. And to be fair, this is what most people — including us — envisioned for Wolfram Alpha from the start:

I’m aware of the theoretical differences between the two, and I’m sure Wolfram Alpha’s creators’ blood would boil at the thought, but the engine’s most natural home might be as a direct complement to Google, as a tab on their homepage or as a replacement for their modest current nonsearch functions.

Well, uh, almost. Maybe this’ll be a good time to give Bing another shot? [CNET]

Rupert Murdoch says he’ll bar Google from indexing any of his sites.

Apparently Murdoch is under the impression that readers who come into his vast media empire (which includes Sun, The Times, The Wall Street Journal, FOX News/movies/channel, MySpace and I-don’t-even-remember-what-else) through Google aren’t going to lead to any sort of profit:

If they’re just search people… They don’t suddenly become loyal readers.

As those “search people” are worthless, they can be ignored and blocked in Murdoch’s world. He explains that the only way to actually make any money on the internet today is to charge for all content and force users to access it directly, because otherwise “no news websites or blog websites anywhere in the world [would make] serious money”.

On one hand, good luck with cutting off one of the most used paths to any online content and then expecting a cheque, Rupe. On the other, if Twitter can charge Bing and Google for indexing rights, shouldn’t one of the world’s most powerful content creators be able to? [Business Insider]

Basically, as you can see in the picture, you will see play buttons alongside different songs when you get search results. If you press play, a popup from MySpace (iLike) or Lala appears, letting you play the full song and giving you buttons to buy it or get more info. You will also have the chance to check out the band on other services/sites, including Pandora, iMeem and Rhapsody. (As you might imagine, there’s no mention of iTunes in all of this.)

In essence, Google isn’t playing the music at all. It’s up to MySpace and Lala to manage the rights of the full-song playback business and to serve up the content. For more info, check out the YouTube video or Google blog. They say they’ll be rolling it out to US Google users over the next day. [Google]

WolframAlpha folks are billing this as a half-priced graphic calculator, with that added benefit that it plugs into the existing WolframAlpha search engine, but again I keep coming back to the fact that I can point my browser at that web site and it costs me substantially less than $US50 to do so.

Said WolframAlpha rep Josh Dilworth in an email to Gizmodo today, “How many people will buy it? We’re not sure, but looking at the other apps that are $US50+, we think that we’re of at least comparable in utility and functionality, if not more. And, part of what the company is also doing is making a statement about the non-trivial nature of WolframAlpha’s capabilities, and how much the system has matured since launch.”

What better way to show maturity than peg your inaugural App Store app with one of the higher price tags in the whole system. Amiright?

Not a major leap in logic, perhaps—it is a Microsoft device with a browser designed by the Internet Explorer team—but still new info on a player that we’ve come to learn a lot about recently, including likely pricing: 16GB ($US220), 32GB ($US290).

In the photo above you can see how the on-screen keyboard letters will bulge when pressed, and CNet also has pics of the browser showing favourites (bookmarks), and running Facebook in portrait mode. [CNet]

The ad: Crammed full of memes and hard on the eyes, it’s a little obnoxious! That’s sort of the point, though, and it does a good job of summing of what’s useful in Bing—its Decision Engine—for people who haven’t really been following the story.

So, Mobile Bing! It’s a typically stripped-down mobile search site, and behaves much like Google’s basic mobile site. Sadly, some of Bing’s most touted features are seemingly absent. Techcrunch notes that most curated results, like health and travel info, don’t work, except for shopping recommendations, which can be a little over-aggressive. That said, in my short testing I found local searches, like weather and films, to be pretty good—even from the UK. [Neowin, BGR]

In the automatically generated top links for Gizmodo are months-old links to single posts about the second Bill Gates/Seinfeld ad and leaked box shots of the Zune 16GB and 160GB models. Really?

Google’s top eight, on the other hand, make a bit more sense, with links to tag pages for the Palm Pre, Steve Jobs and Space—three currently (or recently) trending topics, among others. Bing’s weird results are probably just the result of some young, dumb algorithms, but they certainly don’t look great.

UPDATE: Just like that, Lifehacker’s got a list of cool stuff to try with Bing. [Bing—Thanks, Jagslive, Andy Scott, and Lorenc!]