Brazilian Newspapers Leave Google News En Masse

Dupple writes "In light of the recent story regarding Google threatening a French media ban after France proposed that search engines should pay for content, it seems a similar thing is happening in Brazil, with numerous papers leaving Google News. The controversy fueled one of the most intense debates during the Inter American Press Association's 68th General Assembly, which took place from Oct. 12 to 16 in São Paulo. On one side of the debate were defenders of news companies' authoring rights, like German attorney Felix Stang, who said, 'platforms like Google's compete directly with newspapers and magazines because they work like home pages and use content from them.' On the other, Google representatives said their platform provides a way to make journalistic content available to more people. According to Marcel Leonardi, the company's public policies director, Google News channels a billion clicks to news sites around the world."

Comments

Let them

[jeffy210]

They'll see what happens when their visits drop. People can't be expected to remember every paper that there is and go to each individual site when attempting to find a specific story. This will only be to the papers' detriment.

Re:Let them

[MozeeToby]

Why don't they just put headlines and first paragraphs on one page and set robots.txt to allow search engines to index it, then put the full articles on a different page with indexing not allowed. Google's crawler would get the headline and synopsis and the papers would get advertising from everyone who was interested enough to read more than a few sentences.

Re:Let them

[verbatim]

Yep. Google doesn't show the entire article, they show enough content to drive viewers to the article. It's up to the individual sites to retain those visitors, not Google.

Newspapers should be paying Google for the service of indexing and driving customers to them.

Re:Let them

[radiumsoup]

Well, we certainly don't want fewer sources of opinion, so having them disappear entirely would not necessarily better for everyone... I think their effort is a good way to kick Google in the balls and encourage them to start paying the folks who make them legitimate in the first place.

After all, if it weren't for the news outlets, Google would have nothing to link to (as far as news, anyway)

Re:Let them

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't they just put headlines and first paragraphs on one page....

Have you actually *been* to news.google.com ??? Didn't think so.

Google News is nothing more than an aggregator for news sites. They provide headline and first sentence and a link to the actual news site.

What the news sites are bitching about is people go to google to look at what is happening instead of their main pages. News sites provide the food but they don't make the menu anymore and that is the problem.

Re:Let them

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

They'll see what happens when their visits drop. People can't be expected to remember every paper that there is and go to each individual site when attempting to find a specific story. This will only be to the papers' detriment.

I suspect that, just as everyone is above average and thinks that their children are atypically cute, all the newspapers harbor the dream that they will beat the odds and get to be a 'Portal' for all those precious consumer eyeballs, just like Yahoo or AOL sometime before the turn of the millennium, rather than bleeding subscribers or contributing a sentence or two of scrapings to people's search results...

Re:Let them

[Anonymous Coward]

They should start paying website owners and creators too. If we didn't make websites, they would have nothing to link in their main search either. It is not like there is some mutual relationship that benefits both otherwise...

Re:Let them

[geekoid]

no Google should not pay. Google just show a headline and the first bit. The reader then clicks and goes to the website.
Google is driving people to the site. If I had a business that could double your reader, you would gladly pay me.

Google does it for free.

Re:Let them

[Anonymous Coward]

we certainly don't want fewer sources of opinion

I do. They can shove their opinions, just give me the facts and I'll make up my own opinions.

Re:Let them

[MBGMorden]

Particularly when you boil the situation down to the most basic premise - people are still visiting their site. They're literally made at Google for making it too easy for people to find what they actually WANT from that site. They want the users to have to wade through their own poor interface for a given amount of time - seeing their ads - before they finally find the content.

Forcing your customers into a more difficult path for your own benefit with no incentive to them will not work well. Never has, never will.

Re:Let them

[chipschap]

No kidding. And newspapers wonder why they have declining fortunes. Then they fall back on the old answer: let's legislate / litigate a solution instead of tackling the real problem.

Re:Let them

[just_a_monkey]

This could be a problem for us, the consumers, if the content creators have to ... do less research, and/or provide less depth

If we are talking about mainstream media, I doubt that is possible. So we are safe.

Re:Let them

[Solandri]

They should start paying website owners and creators too. If we didn't make websites, they would have nothing to link in their main search either.

There are basically two types of websites: Free and paywalled.

If your website is free, you're publishing it for people to read without any expectation of payment (except perhaps from ads run on your site). Why should Google have to pay you for viewing your site when nobody else does?

If you website is paywalled, then Google can't index it, so it's not going to show up in their search results and you have nothing to complain about.

And if you're one of those people with a free website but still don't want Google to index it, then just drop a robots.txt file in it.

It is not like there is some mutual relationship that benefits both otherwise...

There is a mutual relationship that benefits both. It's just that the "both" aren't the people you think it is. Google's relationship is with the person searching the web. The person gets the benefit of finding stuff on the web more easily, and Google gets the benefit of advertising dollars. Once Google delivers the viewer to your site, what you do with him and how you monetize it is entire up to you. Google has no relationship with the content provider beyond what a regular viewer has (they read the content).

Re:Let them

[matrim99]

The "problem" is shifting useage patterns. The solution is to shift the business model accordingly. Blaming Google on user's constantly changing behavior is easier than adjusting a business model.

Re:Let them

[DigitAl56K]

This is a blatant misrepresentation of the situation through omission of key facts, aka lie of omission. Google's core operating principle is to define each person and his/her interests and then serve ads based on these interests.

The amount of information they get from knowing what news each person follows and in what way is enormously valuable to google.

Let's say for the sake of argument that's true. So what? Newspaper X objects, removes itself, and Google still learns this because the end user _still_ searches for news and still clicks on results. Newspaper X, Y, Z object, there are a dozen more behind them. Let's say all of them collectively object, and Google News can't show news results for Brazil - an unlikely scenario. What will end users do when they can't see the headlines all on one page? They will still use conventional search to look for new, so Google still learns user preference.

Your whole line of argument is worthless. In fact, it's worse than that, it's backwards, because - and take a seat because this is really going to blow your mind - if Google knows what type of news you're likely to be interested in it can do a better job of getting you to news sites that serve that content, meaning you spend more time on their pages and perhaps monetize better (e.g. through ads or subscriptions). Yes, Google will deliver a higher "quality" user to you.

Maybe you should stop misrepresenting the situation.

there's an available solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Robots.txt. You can prohibit google or any reputable search engine from indexing your content.

The POINT of the HTTP protocol is to serve data, but if you don't wanna, it's your machine that gives the data over. It doesn't have to do that. You have full control over that via several different means, from robots.txt to a paywall. There are blacklists and whitelists - what gets given out is under the control of the serving system. It seems a bit insane to voluntarily reply to a request for data, and then get mad that the other side saw the data. If you don't want them to see it, don't offer it up via a protocol whose entire purpose is to transfer data from a server to a requesting machine.

The internet could never have grown as it did if in the beginning everyone was going to subvert the intent of the technical aspects of it.

It is a curious problem

[ohnocitizen]

Google is clearly in the right - it would break the internet if you couldn't link to articles on another site. That being said, the newspapers are correct in that they are losing traffic to their homepage - people are less likely than ever to bother checking cnn.com vs going directly to google news. What the newspapers fail to see is:
1. They gain far more traffic to article pages than they lose from their homepage.
2. Their homepages are not as inviting as google's - learn from that. Figure out why. Is it just choice, or is there more to it?
3. If they succeed, then sites that currently link to articles and drive traffic - not just google - would delist them. All that traffic coming from reddit, buzzfeed, blogspot, wordpress, facebook, twitter, etc - GONE.

The only way to see the newspaper's side is if you imagine someone make a faux cnn homepage - listing only cnn articles and putting up advertising. That would seem fishy, wouldn't it? But to make that side count - to give it the same weight as google's, you'd need to discount that google is a search engine, displays multiple pages, and gives far more than it takes. You'd need to ignore that enforcement only becomes possible if you end up hurting more than just google - and the impact that would have on the web would be devastating.

That's not the reason to let them.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not the reason to let them. If they block Google, then that is their right. At least they're not demanding Google pay to link.

Block Google, enter a robots.txt, make ignoring robots.txt a copyright offence, whatever.

They're entitled to do so.

They're not entitled to rework the entire internet because they don't like how it operates.

Re:It's not a bad system IMO

[Scowler]

I disagree.

It seems odd to me that the bulk of the money in the NEWS business would go to news aggregators, as opposed to those who are reporting the news in the first place. I think we would get higher quality news, including more exposes, etc. if we could figure out how to fix this oddity.

They'd lose no revenue. No ads on google news.

[Anonymous Coward]

Or have you never been on there?

NO ADVERTS.

Google *Search* has adverts. Google *News* doesn't.

So shutting down Google News will not lose ANY clicking on placed ads.

Idiot.