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Google News to publish agency stories

Posted: 03/09/07 By: Oliver Luft

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Google News has moved beyond simply linking to news stories by forging a deal with four news agencies to publish their stories.

News stories from the Associated Press (AP), Agence France-Presse, UK Press Association (PA) and the Canadian Press will now be hosted on the Google News site.

Google News has also introduced a detection feature that automatically hides links to duplicate stories on other sites.

Google claims that by removing links, a feature that can be turned on and off by the user, it offers a greater range of perspectives and access to original content.

Web pages that augment agency copy with some additional material will still be listed.

"Our goal has always been to offer users as many different perspectives on a story from as many different sources as possible, which is why we include thousands of sources from around the world in Google News," Josh Cohen, Google News business product manager, wrote on the Google News blog.

"However, if many of those stories are actually the exact same article, it can end up burying those different perspectives. Enter 'duplicate detection'. Duplicate detection means we'll be able to display a better variety of sources with less duplication. Instead of 20 'different' articles, which actually used the exact same content, we'll show the definitive original copy and give credit to the original journalist."

The move is likely to cause further ripples of concern through the news business, which is yet fathom its position toward the multi-facetted web giant.

This latest announcement comes at the end of a busy month for Google in which it also began listing YouTube clips in its news section and accepting comments from those involved in certain listed stories.

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