Google News

SFGate reports Chalk it up to a difficult week for Google's automated news service, which tries to outperform newspapers with mathematical algorithms and robots crawling the Web.

The Web search giant was sued by French news agency Agence France Presse, forcing it to start to pull thousands of photos and news stories from its service.

Then critics derided its decision to include reports from National Vanguard, a publication that espouses white supremacy. Google said it will remove the publication from its index.

Both are black eyes to Google's theory that computers, virtually unassisted by human editors, can pick the top stories of the day and beat traditional media at its own craft.... Google is coming under fire because it uses its technology to compile news. Yahoo News, in contrast, searches for news but also forms partnerships with content providers.... In addition, Google News and similar news aggregation sites (like Yahoo and Topix) have become powerful, forcing news organizations like Agence France Presse to rethink their news-distribution strategies. An increasing number of people turn to search to get news, and many publishers have failed to answer readers' shifting appetites fast enough....

Google uses algorithms to find popular news of the day and to cluster different sources on a given story, with links and photos from various publishers. It also has pre-selected roughly 4,500 sources of information and continually reviews new sources for its searchable collection.... It has several guidelines for choosing news sources, including ensuring that the publication is edited. But it does not detail those guidelines on its site, except to say that "news sources are selected without regard to political viewpoint or ideology, enabling you to see how different news organizations are reporting the same story."....

Agence France Presse's complaint charges that Google infringes on its copyright by reusing its story leads as well as the headlines and photos. Fred von Lohmann, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said a legal precedent allows Web publishers to link to thumbnail images. He also said the use of headlines and excerpts from the lead of a news story is fair use.