Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation has held talks with Microsoft about the publisher being paid revenues by Microsoft's search engine Bing if it “de-indexes” its news content from arch-rival Google.

The talks could lead to a battle between the search engines which might turn out to have financial benefits for the newspaper industry.

Murdoch's News Corp's titles range from the Wall Street Journal to the Sun and he has declared that he wants them to move to charging for content.

He also warned that he would — if necessary — go to court to prevent Google “stealing stories” from his newspapers.

News Corp is reported to have started the discussions which sources said were still at a very early stage. But it also emerged that Microsoft has separately approached other large publishers to try to persuade them to remove their content from Google.

It is reported to be willing to pay large amounts for good content which is excluded from Google.

Publishers said that Microsoft is trying to damage Google's margins by leaving it without valuable news content. It is also trying to build up market share for Bing which it launched last year and has a little more than 10% of the global search market while Google's share remains around 65%.

But Google has always played down the importance of news content to its business model.

Its UK head Matt Brittan told a conference of the Society of Editors recently: “Economically it's not a big part of how we generate revenue.”

Search engines generated some £1.75 billion in advertising revenues this year.