Agence France-Presse complained bitterly about its content being retrieved by Google News and asked them to stop doing so; apparently Google is still pulling AFP content into News.
That content comes from a variety of websites, as IDG News discovered in a quick search of Google News. Since AFP sued Google last March about this, and Google agreed to remove “text, thumbnails of photos, and headlines linked to (AFP) articles in external Web sites,” the report said.
A number of news sites, including prominent ones like the New York Times and Bloomberg, reference AFP as a source and byline for stories. These references, in turn, appear in Google News.
I took a few moments to scan the first one hundred results in a Google News search for Agence France-Presse. None of the stories presented came directly from the AFP website, nor were any images from AFP present in those results.
Google News does not license content from those sites appearing in its results. AFP only makes its content available to licensors, and viewed Google’s indexing of it for News results a copyright violation, the article noted.
The whole issue could be decided Tuesday. Both AFP and Google meet in US District Court in Washington DC to discuss the progress of the litigation. IDG News noted that Google’s position contends a dismissal is in order, as AFP has not identified instances of copyright violation.
Out of online news sites, Google and everyone else trails Yahoo News in market share. A Hitwise report for the week ending July 1st had Yahoo News at 6.35 percent of the market, while Google News rated 7th at 1.74 percent.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
