Microsoft’s internet search engine war with Google will revitalise the ailing media industry by helping it profit more from online news, the head of US news agency Associated Press said yesterday.

Microsoft’s move in July to team up with Yahoo! and challenge Google’s dominance of the online search market is a turning point in the traditional media’s efforts to adapt to the internet, AP president and CEO Tom Curley said.

Newspaper executives have complained that Google reaps the benefits from its popular news aggregation site Google News, while the industry gains little revenue from the service which readers access for free. “We stand at an enviable moment where Microsoft and Google have decided to go to war,” Mr Curley said in an address to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong.

“And we who produce content can begin to figure out whether there’s an opportunity for us to help that sharing in a way that reverses the outflow of money from media and takes it back.”

Mr Curley said that increased competition from the turf war, and Microsoft’s plans to improve the reliability of news sources, would all benefit the media industry.

While he declined to criticise Google, the AP boss told reporters that Microsoft has proved keener to collaborate on how to improve the profitability of online news.

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