Microsoft Corp. MSFT, +1.48% and News Corp. (NWS) have held early talks about a plan that would see the latter being paid to "de-index" its news Web sites from Google Inc. GOOG, +0.01% , the Financial Times reported Sunday, citing a person familiar with the situation.

The impetus for the discussions came from News Corp., the FT reported the person as saying, however the newspaper said Microsoft had also approached other online publishers about removing their sites from Google's search engine.