Google News Shifts Focus

Google News has begun to license news stories from four of the world’s major news agencies, opening the way for the site to generate ad revenue.

Google News is changing its focus. For the last five years it’s offered links to news articles from all over the Web, but it will start hosting articlesfrom four news agencies, which will give it the chance to generate ad revenue from the news.   Google News will run articles from The Associated Press, thePress Association of Great Britain, Canadian Press, and Agence France-Presse, whichwill be featured under their own brands under a licensing agreement. Agence France-Presse recently dropped a suit against Google for using its text and photos on Google News without permission.  The new agreement will not affect the ranking of articles in search results.   This licensing of articles is actually very similar to the way Yahoo orthe MSNBC portal on Microsoft have licensed news for over a decade.