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AFP Sues Google Over News Copyright

AFP Sues Google Over News Copyright A large question mark hangs over the future of aggregated news sites supplied by Web companies such as Google after it was revealed that Agence France-Presse had sued the world’s most popular search engine for alleged copyright infringement.

Google had been making the headline, summaries, and thumbnail photos of news stories available to everyone via a search function. Clicking on the story would then take users to the full story and photos on the original site.

It was this practice that set AFP into a giant hissy fit and before you could say “avocat”, the French news agency were filing a law suit in a Washington court.

The action sought damages and interest of at least US$17.5 million dollars (£9m, €13) and an interdiction on the publication of its text and photos without prior agreement.

“Without AFP’s authorisation, defendant is continuously and wilfully reproducing and publicly displaying AFP’s photographs, headlines and story leads on its Google News Web pages,” AFP huffed and puffed in their lawsuit.

The news agency added that it had already asked Google to stop using its copyrighted work, but that the cheeky monkeys “continued in an unabated manner to violate AFP’s copyrights”.

Since the law suit was announced, Google has embarked on the process of removing all AFP content, but has not released a schedule for when the removal will be complete.

Already some pundits are questioning the wisdom of AFPs litigious action, with the Political Gateway Web site serving up a damning article denouncing the ‘stupidity’ of the press agency:

AFP Sues Google Over News Copyright “AFP has over 600 online clients using their news services, sites like Political Gateway. Being blacklisted by the number one search engine in the world is enough to make a news site immediately drop AFP and go to another news service like AP, Reuters, UPI, and the like. We know this to be true because Political Gateway is looking at options right now.

AFP will lose all its online clients except Yahoo.com (which is a search engine itself). However, Yahoo also syndicates its news out via RSS or ‘XML’ feeds. RSS allows webmasters to place news headlines on their site. This would be an offense to AFP and result in suing of Yahoo.

When the dust settles we believe AFP, the oldest news organization in the world, will have lost most of their online clients, their reputation, and face the worst Internet backlash a news service has ever encountered.

As of this week, all AFP news information will be deleted from Political Gateway and hundreds of other sites in protest against the stupidity of AFP.”

The Google News service was launched in 2002 with the site – still in beta – gathering stories and images from the Web and making them freely available to everyone.

With Google making the vast majority of its revenue through online advertising, the news service looks to be an important sector in the increasingly competitive online arena.

If other press agencies follow AFPs litigious route, we could see a premature end to this fledgling service.

We hope not.

Agence France-Presse
Google news
“Google shows AFP who is boss” (PoliticalGateway.com)

Google Movie Search Born

A handy Google search feature went live this week that lets users find showtimes at nearby movie theatres using either their computer or mobile phones and other wireless devices that use short-message services.

The service is available from any Google search box or via SMS.

So a movie hungry visitor to New York could enter their zip code in this search phrase “movie: 10122” to get a listing of what’s playing and when at theatres in their area. If they’re looking for a specific film, typing in, for example, ‘Vera Drake in 10122′ will provide local listings and show times.

The new feature also provides information such as theatre locations and reviews, and enables users to search for movies by title, plot or genre, sortable by movie or cinema.

Other possible searches can help with recommendations or simply refresh fans’ memories (or settle late night arguments).

A query such as “movie: lick my love pump” would return with “This Is Spinal Tap (1984)”, or searching on “movie: great fights” would provide a list of films featuring lots of fabulous punch-ups. And before you ask, yes, it works for naughty words too.

The search results come with a star rating, calculated on an aggregate of online reviews, and links to critics’ reviews.

“We’ll expect more traffic flow overall in movie names,” said Marissa Mayer, Google’s director of consumer Web products. She said increased inventory will increase bidding. “We’re basically creating a new market for AdWords.”

In addition to film studios, Google expects marketing interest from video and DVD distribution companies such as Netflix, Blockbuster Online and Amazon.com, and from marketers of celebrity wallpaper, mobile ringtones and other such money-spinning merchandise.

This latest service ups the stakes in the ongoing bunfight between Google, Yahoo – and recently MSN search – as they battle to provide the most comprehensive set of Web search tools – and get a slice of fast-growing advertising revenues.

Google

Microsoft Search Squares up to Google

After receiving a sound pummelling in previous rounds against the mighty Google, Microsoft has produced a leaner, meaner more bad-ass search engine – and this one looks like it might go the distance.

Ditching their previous reliance on the Yahoo/Inktomi search index, the all-new MSN Search service has been created from the ground up using a Microsoft-designed proprietary index (although the company are still using Yahoo-owned Overture to deliver Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising).

With a spartan, advert-free interface straight out of the Google school of design, the minimalist screen lets users search for keywords from a rich range of sources including web pages, news feeds, images, news headlines, Encarta, music downloads and files on user’s PCs.

All the usual gizmos are on board too, with MSN Search offering word definitions, mathematic calculations, conversions, sports information and just about everything else that their competitors provide.

The new product reflects the intense competition in the increasingly important Internet-based search technology market. With Google already offering a free e-mail program, photo-editing software and a desktop search program for finding files on Windows computers, this development can be seen as Microsoft trying to protect their turf.

But will it be good enough to provide a viable alternative to the current search industry big boys, Yahoo! and Google, both of whom have more market share than Microsoft in the search business?

Danny Sullivan of searchenginewatch.com isn’t completely convinced:

“The core search engine is good and a welcomed new “search voice” in the space. However, it does not make a massive leap beyond what’s offered by Google, Yahoo or Ask Jeeves — the other three major search companies that provide their own voices of what’s deemed relevant on the web.”

This week’s MSN Search launch probably won’t have much of an immediate impact on the search-engine market, but backed by an advertising budget the size of a small country’s GDP, we can expect things to heat up nicely in the coming months.

The timing of the launch, the day before Google announce their first full year trading results may also not have been coincidental.

MSN Search
Wikipedia: Pay per click
searchenginewatch.com

Video/TV Search Beta Launched By Google And Yahoo!

Google has added another product to its long list of extended beta services. Google Video is a TV video-search service that searches the closed captioning content of television programs – from major American TV content providers including PBS, the NBA, Fox News, and C-SPAN, among others – to return still photos and a text excerpt at the point where the search phrase was spoken.

Google Video also; displays a preview page of up to five still video images and five short text segments from the closed captioning of each programme; lists when a particular programme will next be aired in a given area (US only); and allows for searches within a particular show.

Transcripts are available, but not video clips. This service is another milestone as it broadens the company’s strategy of expanding search to information on and off the Web, and it takes it into a market where more advanced services have been available for years.

“What Google did for the Web, Google Video aims to do for television,” said Larry Page, Google co-founder. “This preview release demonstrates how searching television can work today. Users can search the content of TV programmes for anything, see relevant thumbnails, and discover where and when to watch matching television programmes. We are working with content owners to improve this service by providing additional enhancements such as playback.”

Not to be outdone, US-based rival Yahoo! has also launched a video search link on its home page. The Yahoo! service searches and returns actual video clips for playback, but does not offer transcripts. Google and Yahoo!’s video searches are interesting launches, but they do not match those of video search services currently available on the Web. Examples include Blinkx.tv and SpeechBot from Hewlett-Packard, which uses speech-recognition in its search, and ShadowTV, which offers a paid business service. Nevertheless, when a leading search engine company enters a new market, we all know something big is going to happen.

Google Video
Yahoo!

Google Suggest – Search Innovation

Two Google stories in a day! They’re testing a new interface for their search engine that they’re calling Google Suggest.

One of the problems for many users of Google has been the huge number of results returned including ones that apparently had nothing to do with the original request. Other search engines have taken the approach of gathering what they feel are related results together to try and assist the searcher. Google Suggest is Google’s shot at it.

The interface looks the same as it does currently – simple, stripped down and functional – but as you type in your search term, a drop-down box shows a number of suggestions based on what you have entered. It also lists the number of search results would be returned, giving a further guide to searchers.

As an example of how it works we entered “digital”. This bring up the predictable “digital camera”, but helpfully for novice users, it also lists “digital camera review”, which might be more what they are looking for. There are ten suggestions lists in total, which in this case included “Digital radio” and possibly just for a little variety, “digital blasphemy“, not something we’ve come across before, but as it turns out a site selling computer rendered wallpapers that is well worth a look.

Selecting the term bring up the expected list of Google results, but with the Google Suggest feature persisting in the search box.

As ever, Google are innovating in their own way, and given their skill in improving upon innovation, we see no reasons the suggested search terms shouldn’t also list of the audio/video/photo results making searching quicker.

More importantly it’s key to remember that this is helping Google raise revenue. The more precise the search term, the better the match for displayed TextAds, the more likely the searcher is to click on them and in turn, the more income Google will make.

Before you rush to the site to test the ‘rude’ words, don’t get too excited, many don’t bring up suggestions. Although we can well see that testing of the limits of this will become a strand of postings on boingboing.net. Google Suggest beta

Google File Pay Model Retrieval Patent

We’ve been slightly slow on the uptake of this one – Susan Kuchinskas at InternetNews has picked up a US patent filing by Larry Page, co-founder of Google, and it makes interesting reading.

Google News is great for users – we’ve been a news source of theirs for a considerable amount of time and often use its search facilities for research. For Google it’s less great, as they’ve yet to find a way to make money out of it – thank goodness they took the automation path, by throwing tech at it, not people.

The patent, 20040122811, titled “Method for searching media” was originally filed in September 2003 and its core function is summarised by Susan,

to enable search of printed material, offer pay-per-view documents, scanned documents with clickable ads and even the ability for print publishers to swap out ads in digital copies of their printed pages.

There are two key elements of the patent: a method for executing a permission protocol so that the publisher could authorize Google to display more text from the relevant publication; and storing scanned versions of printed documents along with data sets representing the ads that went with them.

It’s not just online text that is covered. CDs, DVDs, audio books, hard copy magazines, newspapers and journals could all be included.

So how could Google make money from this? We find the most interesting idea the ability for them to act as the gateway to the content, charging a predetermined fee for access to the information that they would share with the publisher. Micropayment systems like BitPass and BT Click&Buy have been providing the charging mechanism to information publishers for a long time, and to a lesser degree, the ability to locate information you might be interested in. Google already own the search side, the additional income they could gain for collecting payments for content could be considerable.

Susan covers the innovative ways potential income from the advertising could be raised,

The patent claims a method for updating advertisement information for the printed documents. For example, it would allow the publisher of a hot news story to resell the ad space to a rotating series of advertisers or let advertisers keep the ad but update prices and product information. One of the claims, covers storing information about products in the ads. This might allow the advertiser to create a special landing page associated with the ad, working like a Web banner ad.

Internet News
BitPass
BT Click&Buy