Meanwhile, when you go to the Google Blogger hosted 0hot-girls blog, where the image orginally appeared, you get a message from October 21 that reads in very English-as-second-language, "I am very sorry for this article, and that this is the program automatically issued a document from the article. Do not the subject of race and politics make the discussion too radical and sincere hope that the world is very peaceful."

The monkey picture of Mrs. Obama is no longer there – the entry under her name is just a collection of seemingly random recent clips and photos. That appears to be par for the course for the site itself, which is full of trending YouTube clips and pictures of cars and celebrities. That's right, it's just a useless bot blog. Perhaps the fact that the 0hot-girls blog has ads to "Save Today on Jail Calls" and for the "JCBling Girls Club" gives some indication of their target demographic.

So there you have it. It's not Google's fault if a racist image of Michelle Obama turns up in an image search. It's not even the fault of the blog that ran it – after all, it's not much of a flesh and blood endeavor itself. It is however, as one among the hundreds of recent commentors aptly summed up, "just a ploy to get more hits for the site. And unfortunately, it's working."

Yet despite the near total lack of accountability for the whole rather sorry affair, the way that single image – one that at some point was created by a person -- has ignited attention, outrage, and a fair measure of racist attaboys has little to do with algorithms or optimization. What do you get when you combine random technology with a picture of an animal? An entirely human response.

If Rupert Murdoch can get enough cash from Microsoft to compensate for what his media properties would lose in advertising dollars by cutting off the flow of Google-directed traffic, then maybe the deal makes business sense for him. But it seems to me that the move would also be a bonanza for any major news organization that does not close off its content to Google -- like, say, Bloomberg, or Reuters, or the New York Times.

Because for a plan like this to work, real scarcity must be created. As information consumers, people like me would go to Google, search for something, not find it, and then go to Bing. Or, ideally, from the newspaper industry point of view, we would sign up for paid access. But there's no way this can be pulled off if just a few major publishers ask Google to stop indexing their sites. It will require a preponderance. Maybe Microsoft has enough cash to pay the entire media industry to pull out of Google, but I somehow doubt it.

For the plan to work, it will also require that the vast, endlessly proliferating ecology of Internet filters, such as the millions of bloggers or tweeters or Facebook posters who recommend or summarize news stories, are eradicated from the Net. When searching for news, I'd rather find the original Associated Press article breaking a story, but in a pinch I will settle for a summary. The pathways in which information flows on the Internet are near infinite, and until now, have always been expanding in size and scope. I have paid subscriptions to the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal, but I rarely have time to sit down and devour the daily publications from "front" to "back." I depend on a network of my own Internet filters to tell me what is important or newsworthy -- without them, there is simply too much out there for me to comprehend or absorb.

Microsoft and News Corp want to solve my information overload problem by cutting off the firehose. This reminds one of nothing so much as King Canute attempting to turn back the tide (and yes, I know, he was really just trying to demonstrate God's infinite power as opposed to his puny mortal abilities). In other words, for Bing to dethrone Google or News Corp. to reverse the trend of declining newspaper circulation requires the outright reversal of history. Since at least the mid-'90s, the end users and consumers of information have lived in an environment where every single day offered us more -- more choices, more information, more content of all kinds. Let us recall, newspapers didn't make their content freely available on the Web because they were forced to by Google or anyone else -- they did it because anyone with a brain could see that's where the readers were going. We led -- they followed! They had no choice if they wanted to remain relevant. Readers now have such a bewildering infinity of choices upon which to devote their attention spans that one has to offer a really, really compelling service to make them pay for something.

Perhaps a duel between Google and Microsoft, in which both offer escalating sums of money to newspapers in a grab for searchable content, will be good for publishers, and make up for the decline in classified revenues and the broken monopolies on physical-location-based news provision. But fundamentally, what Microsoft and all the other newspapers looking to retreat from the free Web are banking on is that they can profit by reducing our access to information. Good luck with that.

The WSJ spins the story with the headline "Google, Microsoft Intensify Search Rivalry," in part because on Wednesday Microsoft announced a deal to incorporate real-time Twitter and Facebook status updates into its Bing search engine results. But is this move really aimed at Microsoft? What about Apple? Maybe now we know the real reason why Google CEO Eric Schmidt stepped down from Apple's board of directors.

As far as can be told from the Journal article, Google has no plans to open its own music store. Along with allowing live streaming, it will provide links to other sites where the song can be bought, possibly even to iTunes. But does that make sense? Why add another middleman? Why share the take between three players -- Google, the record companies and iTunes? If the record studios have already licensed their catalogs to Google, why doesn't Google split the revenue with them?

For anyone else, including Microsoft, the marketing challenges involved with dethroning iTunes as the most popular online destination for listeners willing to pay for music are immense. But not for Google. I search for music on Google all the time -- popping in lyric fragments or band names heard on the radio or in a TV ad. Only then do I head over to iTunes. If Google can subtract a step from that trip, I wouldn't think twice.

The record labels, meanwhile, have made no secret of their desire to get out from under the thumb of Apple. If Google makes this as easy as Google typically tends to do -- look out iTunes.

From the Wall Street Journal (italics mine):

The Mountain View, Calif., company's financial state suggests that online advertising, which has weathered the recession better than many other advertising sectors, could be one of the first areas to recover.

Revenue from U.S. Internet advertising fell 5.3 percent in the first half of 2009 compared with the same period in 2008, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, but some analysts forecast it will start growing again later this year.

Advertising budgets are always one of the first things to collapse when a recession hits; a key reason why advertising-dependent media companies are especially sensitive to the onset of economic downturns. But the fact that online advertising has been performing relatively better than other sectors during this recession makes sense, given the massive shift of attention and eyeballs from traditional forms of media to the Internet.

When the economy recovers, the shift of advertising dollars to the Internet, following those eyeballs, is bound to continue, with more force than ever. Google's ready, but it's not clear that the media business is. Lately, we've been hearing a great many old-school media company executives bemoaning what the Web has done to their business models, but in the near future, if you are not successful on the Web, you won't have a business model, period.

Glyn Moody, writing in ComputerWorldUK, thinks the deal is expensive for Microsoft, but the advantages to the move are obvious. From a financial standpoint, Microsoft can now score bigger advertising deals. From a technical perspective, the key to improving search engine performance is crunching a lot of data on what people are searching for and using that information to refine results. Microsoft now has access to vastly more info on what people are looking for than ever before.

Bing already works pretty well, if your metric of success is that it returns Googlish-looking results. But I'm guessing that Google is unlikely to be alarmed. If anything, the news might even be welcomed by Google, as it shoots a big hole in the theory that Google is the 21st century version of Microsoft, lording it over the Internet universe without any significant competitors in sight.

For Yahoo, it all has to feel a little sad. Long ago, in the prehistory of the Web, as a freelance writer who was pretty excited about this thing called the Internet, I wrote a tiny little squib for Wired magazine, "Yippee for Yahoo," announcing the news that two graduate students at Stanford had received venture funding from Sequoia Capital. Back then, start-ups that got the Web like Yahoo were seen as the anti-Microsoft, and the fact that co-founder David Filo was a free-software geek made it all the better.

From now on, every Yahoo search result will be "powered by Bing."

For Jerry Yang and David Filo, that's gotta hurt.