For the second day in a row, Microsoft today sought to distance the company from reports that it's thinking about paying newspapers and other major media to "de-index" their online stories from Google in at attempt to give its Bing search engine a competitive edge.

Such a plan is "not a focus" for the company, said Satya Nadella, a Microsoft senior vice president, during a conference in San Francisco today, according to a Dow Jones Newswires report. Another Microsoft executive, Yusuf Mehdi, made similar comments during a Credit Suisse conference for technology investors on Tuesday.

As the underdog, Microsoft is always looking for ways to disrupt the market, and that includes looking at ways to grow the company's market share by changing the economics of the search business, said Mehdi, senior vice president in charge of online audiences for the company, in response to a question at the conference yesterday. He cited as an example Bing Cashback, and said Microsoft would be also interested in changing the economics for publishers and other content providers

However, he added, "Our focus is on improving the user experience and driving our differentiation of user intent and decision making, not to necessarily pay people to de-index our competition. That's not our focus."

The reports first surfaced in a Nov. 22 Financial Times story that Microsoft was talking to News Corp and oher online publishers about paying them to remove their sites from the Google index.