In other words, you’d start to see ads with “You’ll only find The Wall Street Journal on Bing.com”

If I know I want the WSJ, why wouldn't I go directly there? Does anyone think "I want to know what the WSJ says about X" then goes to do a news search and, not finding any WSJ links then thinks "Well, I guess the WSJ didn't have anything to say about X". No, they go to the WSJ directly to find out what the WSJ says. I bet it's more likely that wanting to know what someone specific says isn't often a use case of searching for news.

That being said, I do use Google to find Wikipedia articles just because Google's search is so much stronger than Wikipedia's at honing in on the entry I want.

Sure, while people do use searching to find websites, people actually need to use a browser that defaults to bing or have changed their default search engine to bing, or need to change their habits to use bing to do search. Is Microsoft's browser monopoly still strong enough to allow them to influence the default search engine use?

One way this could play out is that, if people use "news search" to see what _anyone_ has said, rather than what a specific source says, then the fraction of sources that are listed only with bing (or not with google) are not going to be part of the discussion.

In the end it is about content. I prefer Hulu now to Youtube, because Hulu has better content. If MS can successfully convince enough publications to allow them to exclusively offer their content for search, then that will take a bite out of Google.

The question is, how much will it cost? The formula is pretty easy. MS will have to pay the publishers more than they are making in ad revenue from the visitors Google sends them. As a publisher, wouldn't you prefer to have $100 from microsoft to delist from google if you only get $50 from google referals?

I've been making a joke to my friends recently, ever since this news broke.

    Let's see if we can get all of the rats onto the Titanic before it leaves the shore.