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Comment by _8j50 | Hacker News Reader

Why? Google derives value from news site's content. Advertisers pay google for clicks,if google treated news sites the same as any other site there would be no problem but google is adding additional value to their own product at the expense of news sites without additonal compensation.

You seem to think it is a priviledge to be listed on google, I disagree, it is a priviledge for google to be allowed to conduct business, one that comes with a long list of conditions including fair business practice,paying taxes, hiring fairly,etc...

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Who benefits whom? Does Google gain more from listing the sites, or do the sites gain more from being listed? (They're selling ads to make money, too, you know.)

I would guess that a news site makes more out of having an article listed than Google does from listing the article. It seems a bit unreasonable to make Google also pay. Why not have the news site pay to be listed? They're making money from it, too...

I think you are only looking at the most obvious at the expense of everything else. Ig google is my go to place for news, I would also use them to search for either news related or unrelated terms. If all news sites were unlisted from Google but remained on Bing, Bing's search revenue would increase and Google's will decrease.

I don't know who makes more money out of the relationship, that is not the problem here. Even if news sites make more moneyz they did not sign a contract with Google accepting this financial relationship. If google treats any sites in a special way to increase their own popularity or brand value, even if that site is already benefiting from the relationship Google must either get all the sites consent or negotiate payment.

If a person goes to a news site, the news site makes more moneu but that's a big if. The special treatment means people will glance at headlines and outlines extracted from the news sites and only click on a few sites. This special treatment means less ad clicks for news sites as compared to normal google listings

> Even if news sites make more moneyz they did not sign a contract with Google accepting this financial relationship.

No, and it also didn't sign a contract with Google where Google accepted responsibility to promote access to the news site's pages, either.

So, in the absence of a contract, what determines the way that the relationship between them should be? robots.txt, that's what. If French news sites want to be on the web but not indexed, that's the existing mechanism to control how Google handles the content.

But demanding a contract so that Google can legitimately benefit, but not demanding one so that the news site can legitimately benefit, seems rather one-sided to me.

You think people would switch to bing because news sites were delisted? Many of us would be happy to get back non-official news sources back in the first page of google.

They wouldn't switch but if you are on bing already looking for news you will use bing more which means google less

Google without any content to list will be kinda useless. As a user, a search engine that decides to not list some content for this kind of reason makes it a quite bad search engine.

Without any content? These newspaper make up less content than a needle in a haystack.

If google just listed twitter results that would fill the information void immediately.

If alt publishers were promoted maybe more opinions would be exposed.

Twitter is not an information channel. Alt publisher aren't "alt" something if their opinion is promoted, they are mainstream publisher then. And journalism is a full time job. You should look at how investigation journalist work before spitting on them to realise that it can be replaced by random stuff with unverified content, fake news, or propanganda activists.

They aren't owed any compensation for driving business to the sites.

The basis of commerse is the ability to contract with another party to act in such a way as to create mutual benefit. The fact that someone derives benefit from your actions does not create an obligation unless you have the ability to do otherwise.

This is an attempt to create in law an obligation for a private company to provide a benefit to another private entity for nonsensical justification.

If a few students can create Google a few Frenchmen can create a competitor. They just cannot necessarily convince most to use it.

Such a corporation probably wouldn't pay French news sites either nor would there be any incentive to charge them for it without a pile of other nations money on the line.

> Why? Google derives value from news site's content. Advertisers pay google for clicks,if google treated news sites the same as any other site there would be no problem but google is adding additional value to their own product at the expense of news sites without additonal compensation.

Hmm, sorry, this makes no sense - in this context the only possible advertisers are the news companies themselves (this is how you add your Ad to Google) and they want to be paid for this listing, not the other way around. Can you explain more how does Google derive value from these news articles?

People use more of Google because it does a good job of aggregating news and displaying summary content of news sites. Since people search more on Google as a result that means more revenue for Google. Similar to how Google derives value from Chrome.

Google profit from listing those news site and presenting them in a synthetic way because it’s the whole feature of google news.

Google news is part of the google user experience, that will retains users in time and agregate a detailed profil of the user.

That detail profile include the news search habit.

It does not sound very popular here but I see the leech as being the search engine here, not the company actually producing the content in naturals language and dispatching journalists to work on it.

You and me googling for news sites and presumably clicking on ads (which I’m not really sure are even shown for news queries). In reality I think news sites benefit a lot more from being featured in that feed but i guess we’ll find out soon enough if that’s true

According to other posts in this thread, there are no ads on Google news.

It’s not the ad, it’s your profile. Even if you surf anonymously. Anonymous data will be aggregated. Not as cool as a logged-in user, but okay.

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