News Corp's Rupert Murdoch discusses search plans (NWS 4Q05 conf call quotes)

News Corp's (ticker: NWS) Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch had the following reaction to a question from Anthony Noto of Goldman Sachs regarding Internet search during management's Q4 2005 earnings results conference call:

On Search Plans

Noto:

....you mentioned the concept of a Portal-- great way to bring consumers to one destination for all of your properties, it requires some core internet fangs Ali, which you acquired as part of your internet stake, such as e-mail. One area thaw do not have a core excess see in technology as far as I can is search.

Murdoch:

....As for search, we're not prepared to announce that, yet, other than to say we're in various plans of negotiations to buy a controlling interest in a, what we think is a wonderful search engine, but you will think an insignificant price.

Murdoch on Search Competition

....competition with Google. Google is a pure search company. We're talking about the media here. So I guess if you want to read into it, you can look at competition with Yahoo!, although we don't see why we can't live side by side with them very well. This is an area of enormous growth and there's room for a lot more than one or two players.

(Quotes are from the CCBN StreetEvents transcript.)

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