On Tuesday on the company blog Alexander Macgillivray, associate general counsel for products and intellectual property at Google, wrote that the search engine helps newspaper websites to make more profits through online advertising. He also denied allegations of some publishers that Google misappropriates their content.
"We drive traffic and provide advertising in support of all business models, whether news sources choose to host the articles with us or on their own websites," he said..
"Users like me are sent from different Google sites to newspaper websites at a rate of more than a billion clicks per month," Macgillivray added.
Earlier this week The Associated Press stated that it is going to take measures so as to protect its content against misappropriation on the Internet. On Tuesday Eric Schmidt, a CEO of Google Inc., noted that the company signed a "multimillion-dollar" deal with the AP for the search engine to host and distribute its news.
There were complains on the part of some journalists that allege the search engines like Google and Yahoo violate their rights by making billions of dollars off their news while in fact these profits should belong to them.
Meantime, largest editions from The New York Times Co to EW Scripps Co are seeking ways to cope with the decreasing revenues that poses a serious threat to the viability of their newspapers. Thus most of them are going online to make more money and as Macgillivray Google helps them make more of that money by referring readers back to their websites.
"For news articles we've crawled and indexed but do not host, we show users just enough to make them want to read more -- the headline, a 'snippet' of a line or two of text, and a link back to the news publisher's website," he wrote.
As for those news outlets who think that Google's use of their material is unfair Macgillivray said that they can request their sites be removed from the company's index.
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