A four publisher deal brings content from major news organizations to Google News and its hosting services.

Deals Bring Publishers To Google News

Google News readers will be familiar with the search results they see when a news story by AP gets picked up by a variety of newspaper websites. The story appears over and over again for that topic, with each newspaper destination individually linked, all for the same content.

There is a new destination for those Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, UK Press Association and the Canadian Press stories. Those organizations will have their content hosted by Google, the company announced on the Google News blog.

Google said that since the quartet does not have consumer sites to host their articles, they haven’t benefited from Google’s ability to drive traffic to news websites. That traffic for articles has traveled to newspaper sites that are members of the given syndicate.

Another feature update by Google News should make more views on a topic available, beyond the multiple duplications of the same wire story on all those newspaper sites:

By removing duplicate articles from our results, we’ll be able to surface even more stories and viewpoints from journalists and publishers from around the world. This change will provide more room on Google News for publishers’ most highly valued content: original content. Previously, some of this content could be harder to find on Google News, and as a result of this change, you’ll have easier access to more of this content, and publishers will likely receive more traffic to their original content.

This update should be a welcome one for smaller publishers whose stories may be overlooked, as Google noted. Newspaper websites may not be as excited over the new hosting arrangements, which could deprive them of traffic to AP or other stories where they would have usually drawn visitors.

Google News, Duplicate Content, AP, AFP

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