Google News to Host Wire Service Stories

knhasan writes to tell us that Google has just announced a new program in which they will host wire news stories directly on their site. This is widely believed to be the first concrete fallout from recent troubles with Agence France Presse (who sued Google for alleged copyright infringement) among other wire services. "The new feature unveiled Friday is called 'duplicate detection,' which lets Google News identify the original source of a story that may appear in tens or hundreds of news outlet Web sites. If the source story is from one of the four news service agencies that Google has licensing agreements with, Google will display the story on a page that it hosts."

Woohoo

So we can finally stop getting the same story posted over and over? (hint, digg and /.) If their stories are decent, I'm moving over there....

I'm hoping for better reporting.

So, there won't be duplicates.

Which means that in order to attract people to YOUR news site, you'll have to ADD something. Either background research, interviews, commentary, etc.

Sure, the commentary might not be "better". It will probably still be biased.

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Does this mean Roland will get a wagerise?

*duck*

Where's my nose? I had it a second ago...

First news story on Google wire service: Agence France Presse cuts off nose. To spite face suspected.

Re:Where's my perspective? I had it a second ago..

Really? Where are the court rulings that what Google was doing was illegal? There's only one I'm aware of, in Belgium, that is under appeal.

Finally...

A website that cares about duplicate detection! It's as if they understand that readers don't want to read the same story again and again and again! I wish I could think of another website that would benefit from this technology!

Re:Finally...

A website that cares about duplicate detection! It's as if they understand that readers don't want to read the same story again and again and again! I wish I could think of another website that would benefit from this technology!

Re:Finally...

From:SPAA (Slashdot Posters Association of America)
To: ettiz (639203)

Sir,

We note with some regret (but mostly with glee) that you have duplicated, copied and otherwise stolen one of our (potentil) members Intellectual Property. It is estimated that this heinous crime has cost our (potential) member in excess of $10,000 per view. You have stolen this persons livelihood and he will now be required to live on the street and will, most likely, die of starvation and sorrow before the next equinox. Given these indisputable facts, and your clear malicious intent, we hereby notify you that unless you pay $1,000,0000 immediately to the SPAA (we will then hand 0.001% of the settlement directly to our member) we will be obliged to take you (or someone like you, or possibly someone dead) to court.

We expect and demand your immediate co-operation. (or that of an employer, your children, your ISP or your cat)

Signed

Tod Hsals
(Vice deputy junior legal officer)
Slashdot Posters Association of America

(For clarity, this is not a legal notice, you need take no action, and its totally off topic, if slightly pertinent to your last post.)

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I wish I could think of another website that would benefit from this technology!

What technology? figuring out if many different stories all have the exact same text, by the same author, and attributed to a single news service? Granted, Slashdot has had a history with dupes, but word for word dupes are a different story.

It's a good thing

From a consumer standpoint, I really like this move.

It seems to be completely random which site a given story will point to and there are times when I click through to a news item and I'm immediately skeptical of the source site. If a news vendor isn't doing any sort of value-add, I don't see why I should get sent to bob's scraped wire site versus a trusted major news source.

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I go to google news specifically for the variation in sources.
I like to see the varying articles and standpoints available for the same story (usually in the editorials around the actual feed).
If google starts feeding me a single specific variation with on

Re:It's a good thing

Try reading. It's easier than being stupid. Let me explain.

Hundreds of websites run the same identical AP/AFP/Reuters/UPI/Etc. wire services news story. Until now, G news would show ALL of those stories.

Now, when it detects a story that is from a wire service and just reposted, it will show it on the Gnews site, as Gnews has a subscription for all of them (except AFP apparently.)

However, if the Corner Podunk Press writes an original story on the shuttle launch, it too will be linked.

The loser here are news sites that do run wire service stories as they will no longer be getting free traffic from Gnews. This might encourage them to be more original.

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Try reading. It's easier than being stupid.

Oh dear. If only that were true, the world would be a much better place.

Nope.

Try reading. It's easier than being stupid. Let me explain.

Not true. Being stupid is easier. No explanation required.

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However, if the Corner Podunk Press writes an original story on the shuttle launch, it too will be linked.

However, if the Weekly Podunk Herald writes an original story on the shuttle launch, it will not be linked.

We hate them.

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The loser here are news sites that do run wire service stories as they will no longer be getting free traffic from Gnews. This might encourage them to be more original.

Yeah. I hear the The North Platte Bulletin [northplattebulletin.com] has an opening for a Beijing bureau chief.

Wir

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Now, when it detects a story that is from a wire service and just reposted, it will show it on the Gnews site, as Gnews has a subscription for all of them (except AFP apparently.)

You sure about that? Google displays wire stories from AFP, on the Google

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And if those "reposter" news outlets do become more original (or die off), the wire service loses big time - as it loses lots of subscribers.

Perhaps Google is doing this as a way to hit back at AFP for all the lawsuits?

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Google News is my home page and has been since 2003.

Now let me explain to you.

Editorials on their own pages do not get overlooked by this program.

Re-writing a headline OUGHT to be overlooked.

And by far, the vast and fast majority of the stories that gn

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If they change it or add to it, then Gnews won't filter it out because it won't show as identical.

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I'd mod you up if I had points, that's spot on. The "upstream sources" are syndicated wire news feeds and columns, and the downstream media (that includes "trusted major sources" like the NY Times) pick and choose the bits of a given story that they want t

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Are you retarded? Did you even read the summary?

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disregard my post, didn't even post it on the right story :-P

Let me guess who'd be called "duplicate"

"The new feature unveiled Friday is called 'duplicate detection,' which lets Google News identify the original source of a story that may appear in tens or hundreds of news outlet Web sites.

If the source is AFP, would they just be considered a duplicate out of spite?

All your newsbase are belong to us

Checkmate. Google owns the news. Game over for your local paper. I predicted this many years ago.

It's about time.

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I've never read my local paper for anything other than local news, which Google doesn't report.

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no, this kills news websites (breitbart, apnews.myway.com, etc) that run nothing but wire stories. Currently, story selection etc is computer generated and supposedly fair. I suspect they'll set up something to do user news aggregation/selection/mashup (

Re:All your newsbase are belong to us

Checkmate. Google owns the news. Game over for your local paper. I predicted this many years ago.

The game begins for your local paper.

The Niagara Falls Reporter [niagarafallsreporter.com] is a free tabloid that efficiently - and hilariously - extinguished the career of the most corrupt and incompetent mayor this border town has known in living memory.

It succeeds by relying on a minimal staff, reporting and opinion with strong local roots - in John Hanchette, for example, it has a founding editor of USA Today,a former editor of the Niagara Gazette and a man with a Pulitzer to his credit and a national reputation as a journalist and teacher.

Whoever modded this down is an idiot

The newspaper I was working for when I predicted this is still available at its vestigal domain name here [tribnet.com] where I helped set it up.

At the end of a meeting to review a very expensive (>100K$) demographic survey in 1992, I spoke my mind. I told him a nu

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that communities were more important that forums
Define community for me?

In context

The community is the people. The forum is the place where they meet. More to my point a forum is usually a place where the few educate or entertain the many, while in a community everyone participates, even if it's just to set the limit of what they'll to

Agence France Presse should know that

i didnt even know they had ever existed before google. And they should also know that i will probably forget them in a short while since they are not on google anymore. they lost enormous exposure to pursue some petty cash compared to what the exposure wo

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Newsflash: Poster on Slashdot ignorant about one of world's largest news agency. AFP reported to give a shit.

Film at eleven.

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Newsflash : if a poster on slashdot and a long time resident of internet doesnt know about afp, "the world's largest news agency', then it means that 'world's largest news agency' is not that much 'world's' agency.

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Did you read the article? Google signed a deal with AFP to license/host AFP stories. They are on google now, not just excerpts.

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Well this will certainly please google's Chinese government masters no end, not only will google be able to censor searches to troublesome freedom and democracy news articles, they will now be able to directly censor the news items themselves, either via d

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eh, rather a mocking 'frenchalization' of plain old butt.

In related news...

the UPSTO has just received a patent application from some Dr. McLeod for a "method and apparatus to discriminate identical story submissions in news sites, in which there can be only one".

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the UPSTO has just received a patent application

It's a good thing they didn't file at the USPTO. There may still be time for Google to get a real patent.

dup detection -- fantastic for the smaller papers

I don't know why I'm posting so much today, but anyway.

This is very useful. As far as I can tell, it only means that you won't get a billion copies of the same AP, Reuters, etc. press release that many papers, because they have cut their staff, print in lieu of actually doing their own research. This is fantastic news, and will hopefully be another reward for smaller newspapers who do actually do something instead of print ads for car dealerships. If the Sasquatch Press has a Middle Eastern correspondent, their journalist's work will not be lost in the spam flood of AP articles. Of course, the Sasquatch Press won't have such a correspondent, but they may indeed have one for Sasquatch City -- who probably knows a hell of a lot more than the AP reporter airlifted in when the Sasquatch Robots gain consciousness.

Until now we didn't have a Middle East reporter

If the Sasquatch Press has a Middle Eastern correspondent, their journalist's work will not be lost in the spam flood of AP articles.

You're absolutely right. I'm Stormy Flowers, Editor in Chief of the (Toenail Sands, OR) Sasquatch Press. Nobody knows t

everybody should have seen this coming

Why should google redirect you to joe random's copy of the same AP story when they can display it themselves?

In a similar fashion, froogle/google products (and google in general) has a similar situation with dozens of e-commerce (often shitty osCommerce

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Why should google redirect you to joe random's copy of the same AP story when they can display it themselves?

It costs Google nothing to link to another site, while it costs them to syndicate wire stories. OTOH, if Google displays the story they can keep th

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It costs Google nothing to link to another site, while it costs them to syndicate wire stories. OTOH, if Google displays the story they can keep the ad revenue.

Since there are lots of sites around that do nothing but republish wire service reports in order to bring in ad revenue, it stands to reason that the ad revenue is more than enough to pay for the wire service.

Therefore, what Google is setting up is a payi

Great news for legit sources

This is great news for independent sources that actually publish original content. They won't have as much copycat content to go up against.

Good.

I use goggle news. My main beef with it is for a major news stories, I see there is about 1,000 plus articles. However, when I pull up the full list of them and start clicking some of them to read more of the story, they are all the EXACT same thing. I wou

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Does anyone here realize that most of the AP stories are written by those very same small papers that google will now no longer link to? You don't think the AP actually has 1000's of reporters do you? Seems like a bad deal for the originating sources.

Sounds Like The Wire Services Got Hosed

I'm sad to see google giving in a situation that is obviously a matter of fair use.

However, unless the wire services are getting a fairly substantial *percentage* of the ad revenue they are the ones who are ending up as the losers. Sure had google merely