Google News Goes Straight to the Source

Google yesterday began hosting news articles from the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, UK Press Association and the Canadian Press, allowing readers to go directly to the original source to read the stories that interest them.

The four publications make money as wholesalers, licensing their news content as feeds to other news agencies. But unlike The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times, they don't host consumer Web sites.

So when Google's News service crawled the Web and collected articles, it clustered original content from these four publishers, but the links were from various publishers licensing that content.

So what, you ask? Well, if you clicked on several links in a news cluster, you might see different headlines, but the same story repeatedly. Sort of defeats the purpose of looking for fresh perspectives.

But now that the four agencies are licensing fees to Google, the search portal can provide what it is officially calling "duplicate detection," said Google Business Product Manager Josh Cohen in a blog post Friday afternoon.

"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," explained Cohen. 

Basically, this is an efficiency move, clearing the clutter in an otherwise very efficient news aggregation service.

I love Google News; it's not too fancy and it lets me find what I want, unlike some of these cutesy bookmarking sites that are obsessed with seeming hip or steeped in this Web 2.0 cliche we're all living and breathing.

But I digress. With this move, Google News will house more original content. Moreover, sites who agree to license their content to Google in this manner should get a nice traffic boost.

Good business move all around. It will get really interesting if and when Google can negotiate ways to run ads alongside the content it licenses, always a tricky proposition because publishers don't want to be shut out of that action.

This past April, Google settled with Agence France-Presse (AFP), which had sued the search company in 2005 for allegedly cutting into its subscription business by posting the French news agency's content.  

That case was not a one-off. Copiepresse, an association of 18 French, Belgian and German newspapers won a copyright infringement suit against Google for caching links to news stories the newspapers would normally archive and sell by subscription.