Google recently launched a new service that is causing some noise: Google adds for news.
Firstly what is Google news?
(http://news.google.com/)
Google news searches a large number of selected news sites to be able to provide internet users with up to date information on what is happening in the last 24h.
The idea was born after 9/11 when a lot of people were looking for up to date info on what was happening, but all search engines just came up with results on tourism in new york.
The launch was controversial as Google provided snippets of text from articles by news papers without any agreement with these providers. A large number of law suits followed but were quickly dropped when Google removed these news sites completely from the Google index. This resulted in much lower traffic for these news papers.
So what is the big deal with adds for Google news?
Google is using content it finds on the internet for free, copies it on it's servers, displays it to their users and earns money with adds without sharing anything with the original publisher.
Is this a step too far?
More info:
http://www.betanews.com/article/Google-News-to-add-ads/1235730510
