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The Google News Dilemma

Posted by timothy on from the to-beta-or-not-to-beta dept.

(54)T-Dub writes "Wired has an interesting article about the status of news.google.com. It has been 3 years since its release and the major bugs have long since been ironed out, so why is it still in beta? Apparently, it's because Google hasn't been able to figure out how to make money off of it. Slapping up some Google Adwords seems like the obvious solution. The problem is that Google News has multi-million-dollar news publishers scared because of the incredibly low-cost method that Google has employed to bring us 'up the minute news.' Currently they are able to scrape the content of news sites under fair use because they are not using it for commercial purposes. Once they move away from the nonprofit, educational purposes of their system they can expect to be deluged by cease and desist orders. Before you break out the tissue box though, remember that google sent their own cease and desist orders to a Google News RSS feeder a few months back."

3 of 310 comments (clear)

  1. Take the Strategy of "The Economist" by reporter · · Score: 0, Troll
    Quality news sources like "The Washington Post" and the "Los Angeles Times" should follow the lead of "The Economist" and the "Wall Street Journal". The last 2 journals charge a fee for browsing their articles. The quality of these 2 journals is so high that people are willing to pay for reading their articles. Indeed, the subscription rate of "The Economist" is increasing.

    Google does not produce links to "Economist" articles or WSJ articles via the New page. However, via the regular search page, you sometimes see links to such articles. If you clink on the links, they take you to a page requesting that you pay for a subscription to the journals. There is no cached version of them.

    On the other hand, if you are a low-quality journal like "New York Times", then you have plenty to fear.

    By the way, do try Yahoo News, which is much better than Google News.

  2. Re:gmail content by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll
    10 out of 10 Terrorists agree - Anybody but Bush in 2004

    If you know the terrorists well enough to poll 'em, why didn't you pump a few bullets into their heads while you were asking the questions?

    Oh... you were just masturbating and came up with the slogan and thought it was clever. Sorry, my mistake.

  3. Who cares? by GoClick · · Score: 0, Troll

    I almost never use Google news.

    It's just not useful and the lack of an Atom feed (Yes I prefer Atom over RSS) bothers me.

    Yes it's kind of fun but not all that useful and it's fraught with errors.

    It's too easy for people to use the search and end up finding news from disreputable sources and then IM spamming their friends with something no better than an Onion article.

    Not to mention it added yet another button to Google's font page there by taking it one step closer to being Yahoo, how long before headlines show up on the start page and ads for "Music At Google" featuring Britney Spears and "Cool Camera Phones" from AT&T

    Google News top headline July 27 2009:
    "Google has become Yahoo"