• Barron's, Wednesday, November 4, 2009 3:14 PM

If only for a moment, Google considered buying The New York Times. Yep, Google co-founder Larry Page and CEO Eric Schmidt tell author and New Yorker scribe Ken Auletta that the search giant took a serious gander at the Grey Lady. The two said their chief concern with the prospective deal was the damage it would have done to the company's status as a neutral source.

In his new book, "Google: The End of The World As We Know It," Auletta writes that they "decided that if they succeeded it would sabotage their identity as a neutral search engine ...The reason they are interested in preserving the New York Times is that Google's search engine depends on good information, and The Times is the world's best newspaper."

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