By Sarah Rabil and Dina Bass (Bloomberg) – News Corp. is considering blocking Google Inc.’s Internet search engine from displaying its news articles and is talking to Microsoft Corp. about listing only on its site, according to people familiar with the matter.

The talks with Microsoft are still at an early stage and may not result in an agreement, said the people, who declined to be identified because the discussions are private. Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft is also talking to other publishers, one of the people said.

Microsoft is seeking exclusive content to draw users to its Bing search engine in an industry dominated by Google, which has about six times as many U.S. users. News Corp. Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Rupert Murdoch said this month he may block Google from scanning and indexing stories from his newspapers, which include the Wall Street Journal and Times of London.

The Wall Street Journal charges users for access to its Web site. Murdoch has said he plans to start online subscriptions for all of News Corp.’s newspapers.

Search engines use automated robot programs to crawl the Internet and index sites. Online publishers can block these programs by including a file called robots.txt on the site.

Lou Gellos, a Microsoft spokesman, declined to comment. Jack Horner, a News Corp. spokesman, also declined to comment. Gabriel Stricker, a spokesman for Mountain View, California- based Google, also wouldn’t address the negotiations.

Meeting Publishers

Google’s news search drives traffic to publishers’ Web sites, and publishers can remove their stories from search results if they want, Stricker said in an e-mail.

Microsoft has been holding meetings with publishers to discuss models for making money on the Internet, using the Bing search engine and the next generation of standards for protecting newspaper intellectual property on the Internet, one person said.

This month, Microsoft representatives made a presentation at a meeting of the European Publishers Council, which includes the Financial Times, News Corp. and Axel Springer AG, according to Heidi Lambert, a spokeswoman for the council. Google didn’t attend, Lambert said. She declined to comment on what was discussed or who else attended, saying the meeting was private.

Separately, News Corp.’s MySpace social-networking site has a three-year, $900 million advertising agreement with Google that expires next year. MySpace’s revenue from the deal may fall short by about $100 million this year as traffic declines, News Corp. Chief Operating Officer Chase Carey said this month.

News Corp., based in New York, rose 3 cents to $12.01 at 2:16 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. Microsoft gained 30 cents to $29.92, while Google jumped $11.64 to $581.60.

Google’s share of the U.S. online search market climbed to 65.4 percent last month, from 64.9 percent in September, according to ComScore, a Reston, Virginia-based research firm. Microsoft rose to 9.9 percent from 9.4 percent.

Discussions between News Corp. and Microsoft were reported earlier by the Financial Times.

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