Google News Goes Opt In In Germany

Google has changed the way that Google News works: but only in Germany. The change is as a result of legal changes in that country. Essentially, now, German publishers can or have to opt in to their product being indexed by Google News. Rather than the previous system of assuming that if it was on the net and not protected by robots.txt, then it would be included.

The announcement is here and for those whose German is not up to scratch a rough translation from Google Translate (what else?):

A few weeks ago a law was passed in Germany: the related right for press publishers. In light of this development, and in light of the legal uncertainty that comes from the law, we have introduced a new confirmation system. With this we offer German publishers another way to tell us whether their contents (continued) to be displayed in Google News. This new confirmation statement is an addition to the existing technical possibilities for publishers to determine for themselves whether their contents to be displayed in our services – or not. Such tools such as robots.txt be recognized alongside Google and many other search engines and Internet services.

In all other countries, we will maintain in force, proven process: if a publisher makes its content available on the net, they are included in Google News. If publishers do not wish to be included in Google News, you can use a variety of technical options (robots.txt, meta tags) use to prevent indexing by Google – or simply tell us that their content will not be recorded. This is the best way to ensure that a wide variety of publishing votes are represented in our service – and not just those who have the administrative resources and the time for such processes.

That’s the heart of it. The law change in Germany has left everyone a little unsure of what is a “snippet” that an indexer should pay for and what is one that they should not. Thus Google is stating that if you want to be in the index then you should tell us so. And we’ll then assume that given you want to be in the index that you don’t want us to pay you.

Do note that this only applies to Germany: that being the only country that has recently changed its copyright law giving rise to this uncertainty of what does need to be paid for.

Google emphasise, as they always do, that Google News is a non-commercial product. It carries no ads, garners no revenues. With the obvious implication of this assertion being that there’s no revenue for any publisher to lay claim to.

My best guess is that almost all publishers will indeed opt in. As soon as they see the loss of traffic from not being in the News index that is.

Author : http://www.forbes.com