In addition to Google (NSDQ: GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt’s keynote at NAA today, Alexander Macgillivray, associate general counsel for products and intellectual property, responded to the Associated Press via the company’s public policy blog. Macgillivray writes that users are sent from different Google sites to newspaper sites at the rate of more than one billion clicks a month — and that Google helps the publishers make money from those referrals: “Our AdSense program pays out millions of dollars to newspapers that place ads on their sites, and our goal is that our interest-based advertising technology will help newspapers make more from each click we send them by serving better, more relevant ads to their readers to generate higher returns.”
As for AP’s campaign, Macgillivra adds “that it doesn’t appear to pertain to Google since we host those articles in partnership with the AP. We announced that partnership in 2007 as part of an experiment in hosting articles on our site. In hosting agreements such as this, we pay news agencies and display the entire text of articles, such as this one from the AP about President Obama’s visit to Turkey.”
His defense of crawling includes a description of what Google does — “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 to the news publisher’s website” and a reminder that Google will remove content on request or follow tech options “such as robots.txt or metatags.”
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