Google will try to communicate what its News site is all about to news junkies and the publishers that make news available to readers.

One old-media journalist thinks it’s time to unleash a brigade of Louis Vuitton-bearing lawyers on Google to stop them from stealing from newspapers.

As a daily user of Google News, I’m interested in what will happen to it – for better, for worse, or for just plain different.  According to a recent interview with Nathan Stoll, one of Google’s product managers, there may be a lot of changes in store, including the introduction of video.

“Google News May Introduce Video Component”

It was as much news to Google as it was to everybody else when UK-based Sunday Herald reported that the search giant had reached a financial agreement with several British newspapers to index their content for Google News.

America, France, Belgium . . . these are the countries in which some news services have received payment in return for having their content carried by Google News, and now the UK has reportedly joined the gang.  But don’t tell anyone – the arrangement is supposedly being kept quiet so that other organizations don’t request the same deal.

Google News has taken steps to remove the questionable Romanian news site Playfuls.com from its news content after suspicions that they were gaming the system, as first reported by WebProNews.

It’s newspaper billionaire versus tech billionaires as the man who would buy the Tribune Company (and dump the Cubs as soon as possible) tells the newspaper industry that Google rips off their content.

If you

Take a look at Google News U.S. and how many obscure foreign news sources are linked to. Of course nothing is wrong with this until you realize that the stories these sources are writing about are U.S. based. Looking deeper it’s obvious that some of  the news sites appear to be only writing about these stories in order to get traffic from Google News U.S..

The home field advantage paid off: according to the latest data from comScore, the BBC website receives more visitors than Google News in the UK. For that matter, Yahoo News also ranked higher than Google News, by a margin of about 900,000 people.

Woe is Google, huh? In terms of numbers, it’s not even close to the top of the news site pile, and in terms of brand name, it has some less-than-distinguished company.

It’s beginning to look like 2007 could be a very long year for Google in the legal department.

In a court ruling early Tuesday, a judge ruled in favor of Belgian newspapers in their dispute with Google, citing that the Internet company was guilty of copyright infringement.

The Brussels court ruled in favor of Copiepresse, a consortium that represents the eighteen newspapers that brought complaints against Google.

At WebProNews, we try to write about important and interesting things, but groundbreaking developments simply don’t occur every day. There are times, even, when it seems like there’s nothing to report. Google News is apparently experiencing a similar problem – earlier today, the site was entirely devoid of stories.

Sure, Google searchers like to keep abreast on world events, as long as those world events happen near Paris. Ahem, Paris Hilton that is. Like jewelry, we like our celebrities, and news about our celebrities, shiny, dumb and useless

Media groups in Norway and Denmark have begun, like several others before them, to protest Google News’s practices. The Norwegian association objects to the reproduction of certain images and photographs, while the Danish faction is asking Google to make separate arrangements with each publisher.

According to one blogger, “Google News is becoming unusable.” That statement started off a fairly standard anti-Google rant, but the outburst was posted on a site that doesn’t usually discuss that sort of thing. Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of the political blog Daily Kos authored those words, and has withdrawn the site from Google News.

Those on the Tokyo subways will have more to do now besides sleep standing up and fend off the pervs pressed up against them. Google is offering its Japanese-language Google News service free of charge via mobile phones.

Scrolling down the entertainment section of Google News, there’s something about Martin Scorsese, a remake of Office Space, and a thumbnail of a topless bleach blonde silicone starlet linking to a gambling site… wait, something’s not right.

Shortly after some impressive huff-and-puff grandstanding, Google decided it best to comply with a Belgian court order after all. The company initially refused an order to post a ruling against Google on its Belgian homepage and Google News site, and seemed to take the $640,000 daily fine on the chin.

The Chilling Effects website revealed a judgment rendered by the Court of First Instance against Google that would ban them from indexing Copiepresse’s French- and German-language news and photographs.

Agence France-Presse complained bitterly about its content being retrieved by Google News and asked them to stop doing so; apparently Google is still pulling AFP content into News.

Jeremy Wagstaff found some really bad examples of spam in Google News.