Once upon a time a group of Belgian newspaper publishers decided that they didn't like how Google was indexing their news stories and publishing headlines and short snippets on Google News and Google.be. While many newspaper publishers realized that Google was actually directing traffic to their web sites, Copiepresse, the organization representing the group of Belgian publishers took Google to court and demanded the search engine remove those newspapers from its index.

Google lost the court case and complied. But apparently not receiving search engine traffic isn't good enough for the newspaper publishers. No, they want cash. Up to €49 million or $77 million in cash, to be specific.

Now, in theory, we get it. Google was posting information online without first getting permission from the publishers. We'd argue that this was probably fair use since Google was only posting snippets including headlines and a few sentences. But the courts ruled otherwise, so whatever. The thing is, search engines are a huge driver of traffic. Asking the world's largest search engine to remove your pages is like asking to lose readers and advertising revenue. Even if the courts determine that Google does owe the newspaper publishers fines for infringing on their copyrights a few years ago, those newspapers are losing money today by keeping themselves out of Google's search index. And over time, that's could cost the companies a lot more than $77 million.

[via Techdirt]

Microsoft has rolled out a new improved news search engine under its Live Search banner. Overall Live Search News looks a lot like you'd expect a news search engine to look if you've used another one like say, Google News. But there are a few features that make Live Search News stand out:

• An orange banner will pop up and highlight breaking news at the top of the site, but only when there's actual breaking news, which is kind of refreshing in today's 24/7 news environment when many news agencies are pretending there's always something breaking.
• See that blue sidebar on the right? Yeah, we thought it was for advertising at first too, but it's actually local news selected for you based on your IP address. No need to sign up and change your settings to get local news tailored to you.
• Once you enter a search term, you can further refine your search from a list of categories, or select from a list of related searches.
• Videos are featured right on the main page, and if you mouse over them you can preview the videos before deciding whether to click to watch the full video.

Overall, we're pretty impressed with the new Live Search News. Our only real complaint is that there doesn't appear to be a way to subscribe to RSS feeds for searches.

[via CNet]

Google News is working hard to either kill your local newspaper or make you read it more often. While Google News has typically gathered the top stories from news sources across the web and presented the top world and national stories, you can now get local pages for pretty much any major city.

All you have to do is visit the Google News homepage, scroll down the page a bit until you see a box asking for a city, state, or zip code. Fill in the box, and Google will add a local section to the page. You can also click the hyperlink to get a standalone page. For example, this link takes you to a Google News for Chicago.

There's no real local search tool yet. If you enter a search term from a local news page, you still get global search results.

[via Google Blogoscoped]

The Associated Press is suing Moreover, an online news aggregator and its parent company VeriSign. The AP says the company is illegally accessing and distributing Associated Press content without permission.

Moreover is sort of like a subscription version of Google News. If you visit the company's main page you get a lot of information about the service, but no free content. Users can sign up for RSS feeds on a variety of topics or you can pay a subscription fee for more in-depth content.

Moreover isn't producing news. It's collecting news from various sources and sending it along to subscribers. Each story you get from Moreover is really just a link and a brief description. If you're using the ad-supported version of Moreover's services you'll have to click through to the original website to find the full content. Paying subscribers can access full length stories from the AP and other news sources.

So here's the question: is Moreover ripping the AP off, or is it actually helping the wire service by directing more readers to AP news content online? While Google claims that the Google News service constitutes "fair use," the company has reached a deal with the AP and several other major news providers to distribute content. But Google also doesn't offer a premium service with full-length content scraped from other news publishers.

[via lost remote and Ars Technica]