Google News
Google News is an automatically generated internet news page of the company Google Inc. The service is available in over 43 countries in more than 20 languages. In April 2002, Google News launched in English in the beta version, in which it remained until 23 January 2006. The German version uses more than 700 news sources from the German-speaking countries and is still in the beta phase. According to Google, the selection of articles is done entirely by computer.
- 2.1 News Agency
- 2.2 Situation in Belgium
Operation
The messages on the website do not come from Google News itself, but are caused by computers using an algorithm from a variety of news sources compiled ( aggregator ). In order to be listed in Google News, a separate registration is required. The entries are automatically generated and updated about every 10 minutes. Google thus dispense with a journalistic treatment by relevance or truthfulness of the item by human hands. The relevance of an article implies amongst others of the plurality of retrieval. Google News then supplies the appropriate links. The used algorithm for automatic indexing of the article goes back to Krishna Bharat, a leading scientist of Google, in 2001.
Other Features
A personalization of Google News is also possible. This means that the search protocol is in relation to the topics chosen by the user changed. This requires preregistration is required. In addition, you can feed in the formats RSS and Atom Subscribe and get them send new messages to the mobile phone and to your e -mail address (News Alerts).
Legal disputes
News agency
In March 2005, the news agency Agence France-Presse ( AFP) sued Google the company for compensation of 13.2 million Euro in an American court. Reason was the indexing of AFP articles from Google News. AFP called Google on several occasions not to use the content without permission. It took two years to the dispute over the use of images, text and files of the AFP. In April 2007, announced both sides that they had reached an agreement by Google acquires the license to use. Even with other news agencies agreed to use Google similar agreements from their content. So even with the Associated Press, the Press Association and the Canadian Press. In March 2009, the European Pressphoto Agency ( EPA ) concluded an agreement with Google News to use content and images of eight of the eleven EPA members. The German news agency dpa, as one of the largest members of the epa, rejected the agreement.
Situation in Belgium
Belgian newspaper publishers suing Google because they see the copyright of their newspapers by the preparation of Google News in danger. Already in 2006 filed a lawsuit against the newspaper publisher the search engines, then they got right. Google lodged an appeal against the judgment. In May 2008, the publisher filed a lawsuit again. 2011 a court ruled that parts of the text and images of newspapers may not be aggregated in Google News. Then put Google all references to French-and German -language newspapers in Belgium from the search index.
Google News Archive
2006, the English version of the intelligence service has been extended to an archive search for older editions of the New York Times and the Washington Post. This service has been expanded with a new version on 8 September 2008. However, by the archive search it came to a serious incident for the U.S. airline United Airlines:
On Sunday, September 7, 2008 the computer indexed by Google News an article from 2002, from the website of the newspaper Sun-Sentinel, a sister site of the Chicago Tribune, which actually published the article. The headline of the article was " United Airlines Files for Bankruptcy ". The page did not contain any indication of the date of publication. According to the New York Times sent on the following Monday morning, the Informationsdienstleistner Income Security Advisors, the news service Bloomberg various articles on bankruptcy messages. Among probably the article on United Airlines from 2002. Bloomberg took the message and published them. Within a few minutes, the share price of the airline broke and lost more than 1 billion U.S. dollars in value. Trading in the shares was then temporarily suspended. The entry was not linked on the front page of Google News, but could be found through the search function.
Then criticism of the practice of Google News was loud, make any examination of the articles on timeliness, relevance or truthfulness.