WebProNews

Google Changes How it Handles Paid Content

Google has made a change to the way it treats its "first click free" option for publishers. The option was designed for legitimate publishers to get around Google's cloaking policies, which discourage the showing of one web page to a crawler while the user sees something different.

Google Improves Google News on More Mobile Devices

Google has announced a new Google News for iPhone, Android, and Palm Pre users. The company already offers one for other devices like Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and S60, although they say more improvements to those versions will be coming soon, as well. Today's new version includes a new Google News homepage, which shows more stories, sources, and images, but keeps the same basic look and feel.

80% of Consumers Would Not Pay For Content

As you've more than likely heard by now, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch in an interview last week talked about the possibility of blocking search engines from indexing News Corp. publications' content. While this may or may not actually happen, it is one of the latest (and biggest) examples of a publisher taking the position of search engines hurting them rather than helping them.

The Traffic News Corp. Would Lose Without Google

As you may know, Rupert Murdoch, Chairman and CEO of News Corp., is saying he may block search engines from accessing the organization's content. He expressed this notion in a recent interview. If Murdoch were to act upon this, it would mean theoretically that you would no longer be able to find Wall Street Journal, New York Post, etc. content on Google. Of course that would be in a world where scraped content isn't frequently crawled by search engines.

Google Further Customizes the News Experience

Google has launched a new Google News feature called the Custom Sections Directory. This is a page where users can go to find and create customized sections covering narrower topics to put on their Google News homepages or share with other users.

UK News Sites Getting Big Traffic from US

British news sites are starting to see a lot more traffic from the US. UK Internet visits to News and Media websites grew by 8% last year according to Hitwise, and US Internet visits to UK News and Media sites have gone up by 54%.

Kanye, Swayze, Others Propel Google News to Record Week in UK

Google News had a record week in the UK last week. Hitwise attributes this largely to a big week for celebrity news.

Google Trying to Differentiate Between Blogs and News?

Google News is now labeling certain publications as blogs in search results. I'm not sure exactly how long it has been like this, but I noticed it for the first time today. In the past they have separated "news" and "blogs" on some results pages, but in what I'm talking about now, the results are mixed together, but some publications have "(blog)" written beside their names. You can see a few examples here:

Google Acquires CAPTCHA Company

Google announced today that it has acquired reCAPTCHA, a company that provides CAPTCHAs to over 100,000 sites around the web. Perhaps you're thinking that Google was inspired by a patent recently granted to Microsoft for advertising via the CAPTCHA. Maybe Google will be the first to offer AdWords in CAPTCHAs. Maybe "relevant" CAPTCHA text.

Google Fast Flip vs. the Blogosphere

For being nothing more than a "labs" project for Google, Fast Flip has received an overwhelming amount of attention as well as criticism. In case you have been under a rock, Fast Flip is a lab Google launched, that has been talked about before under its codename, "Flipper."