Google has struck deals with four major international news agencies that will see its Google News site become a publisher of their news stories.
An announcement on the Google News blog Friday said, "Today we’re launching a new feature on Google News that will help you quickly and easily find original stories from news publishers — including stories from some of the top news agencies in the world, such as the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, UK Press Association and the Canadian Press — and go directly to the original source to read more."
The reason for this, according to Google News business Product Manager Josh Cohen , is that since the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, UK Press Association and the Canadian Press do not have a consumer website where they publish their content, they have not been able to benefit from the traffic that Google News drives to other publishers. "As a result, we’re hosting it on Google News."
The announcement that Google is to publish news content on its own site is likely to be met with some concern from the news industry, which has struggled to work out whether the web giant's activities across video, advertising and book publishing are a threat or an opportunity, the Guardian reported.
Google News would scan news stories produced by the agencies and omit from its search results any duplicated versions of stories from these agencies that other news sites host. Instead, the site will show the original agency stories. If the agencies do not have their own news site, Google will host the copy itself.
Cohen said, "Our goal has always been to offer users as many different perspectives on a story from as many different sources as possible, which is why we include thousands of sources from around the world in Google News. However, if many of those stories are actually the exact same article, it can end up burying those different perspectives. Enter 'duplicate detection'.
"Duplicate detection means we’ll be able to display a better variety of sources with less duplication. Instead of 20 different articles (which actually used the exact same content), we'll show the definitive original copy and give credit to the original journalist. We launched a similar feature in sort-by-date and got great feedback about it. If you want to see all the duplicates on other publisher websites with additional analysis and context, they’re only a click away."
"By removing duplicate articles from our results, we’ll be able to surface even more stories and viewpoints from journalists and publishers from around the world. This change will provide more room on Google News for publishers' most highly valued content: original content. Previously, some of this content could be harder to find on Google News, and as a result of this change, you'll have easier access to more of this content, and publishers will likely receive more traffic to their original content," Cohen said.
The move is also likely to raise speculation about Google's motivation in publishing news content on its own site, the Guardian report felt. Google News does not yet publish advertising alongside its news search results, but has built its $160bn (£79bn) value on contextual advertising. Google does not give figures for traffic to its news site, but now displays the most recent stories from around 10,000 international news sites.
The service has been the subject of some controversy in the news industry and was successfully sued by Copiepress, a group of Belgian newspaper publishers who said the practice of publishing extracts of its news stories in search results was a breach of copyright.
Google’s licensing of articles from news organisation partners is similar to how rival news sites like Yahoo News or MSNBC have licensed news from news organizations for more than a decade, a Reuters report pointed out. “We are licensing our content to Google,” said Jane Seagrave, vice president of new media markets at the Associated Press. “It’s exactly the same content that we license to 300 to 400 websites.”
She declined to comment on the terms of the deal, and whether Google would run ads alongside AP articles. Because of Google’s campaign to simultaneously reduce duplicate articles, the original wire service article is likely to be featured in Google News instead of versions of the same article from newspaper customers, sapping ad revenue to those newspapers.
AP has licensed access to its national and international wires but not its state and local wires, which are reserved for use by the news consortium’s member newspapers, Seagrave said.
