• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, December 1, 2009

Count Arianna Huffington among those who doubt that Rupert Murdoch will pull News Corp's articles from Google's search index in favor of giving Bing exclusive access.

"I'll gladly wager my share of The Huffington Post that this ain't gonna happen," she said this morning at the Federal Trade Commission workshop "How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age."

Huffington made the now-familiar arguments that Google and other aggregators give news sites far more in monetizable traffic than they could capture in subscription fees. "We link to the Wall Street Journal daily. We have never had a single complaint," she said. "We drive a lot of traffic to them and they like it."

The Huffington Post proprietor also went after News Corp. for making repeated attacks on aggregators, her site included. "When all else fails, reach for the nearest insult and throw it around indiscriminately," she said, and then recited the litany of unflattering names various executives have called Web sites that summarize and link to others: "Parasites, content kleptomaniacs, vampires, tech tapeworms in the intestines of the Internet, and, of course, thieves who steal all our copyright."

Google, for its part, is acting as if News Corp. and other publishers are seriously contemplating paid walls. Consider, the search giant said today it was revising its "First Click Free" program for paid sites by allowing publishers who participate to impose daily limits of five free accesses per user.

Google previously required publishers in First Click Free to allow anyone who came to an article from Google's search engine to read the entire piece. While the program allowed Google users to sample articles at no cost, it also enabled savvy searchers to read everything for free by accessing each individual story through Google.

The new policy is aimed at giving paid sites like WSJ.com the flexibility to stop Google users from accessing everything gratis, while also encouraging sites to experiment with business models that allow visitors to sample articles before subscribing.

Of course, whether the tweaks to First Click Free will boost subscriber revenues or result in a drop in news sites' traffic remains to be seen. But Google's attempts to placate publishers seems to show that the company is at least a little spooked by some of the Web-bashing rhetoric.