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After a seven-week-long hiatus, Google is now hosting content from the Associated Press again. The two have had a deal in place in the past, but AP content quietly went missing from Google, and that very fact became a topic of wide discussion last week. Now the deal appears to be renewed to some uncertain extent.

The statement Google has given on the matter says, "We have a licensing agreement with the Associated Press that permits us to host its content on Google properties such as Google News. The licensing agreement is the subject of ongoing discussion so we won’t be commenting further at this time."

An AP spokesman is quoted as saying, "We have nothing to add to Google’s statement."

If you’ve followed the online news industry much, we probably don’t have to tell you that Google and the AP have had a somewhat complicated, if not rocky relationship.

Last week, Yahoo reached its own deal with the AP. Financial terms of that agreement were not disclosed.

This week, the AP promoted editor and correspondent Ted Anthony to Assistant Managing Editor. He is said to have been involved in the development of the news organization’s social media practices.

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Google has a post up on the Google News blog today talking a little bit about how it recrawls news content in order to provide the most up to date content and eliminate dead links.

"How do you balance looking for new content against the need to update older content? How can you make sure the content is fresh, doesn’t link to dead pages or display headlines that have been changed by the publisher?" asks Google.

Google’s answer is that it has implemented a recrawl feature that lets it focus on getting the newest content, while displaying the most current version of older content. After Google News discovers an article, it will continue to crawl it repeatedly to look for changes. In the first day, it will actually recrawl it more frequently, because as the company says, the most changes are usually made to news stories soon after they’re published.

"In some cases, we’ll even revisit articles we had trouble crawling the first time around," says Google. "After that, we visit them less often. Either way, we try hard to present users with the freshest news. (We bet whoever wrote "Dewey Defeats Truman" wishes they had recrawl!)."

Google says the feature is intended to reduce the number of outdated headlines and dead links, and for publishers, it will provide assurance that Google will index the latest stories and updates as soon as possible.

Related Articles:

> Google Changes How it Handles Paid Content

> Minds of the Media Gather to Discuss Future of News

> Google Okay With Blocking News Corp.

Update 2: Google has now placed Fast Flip at the bottom of Google News.

Update: Google announced that it now has 2 dozen more publishers representing over 50 publications on board the Google Fast Flip train (which is still in experiment status). New sources include Tribune Co. newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, McClatchy Company newspapers such as the Miami Herald and the Kansas City Star, the Huffington Post, Popular Science, Reuters, Public Radio International, POLITICO and U.S. News & World Report.

Original Article: 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."

What it does is let you "flip" through news articles on the web, as you would do with a magazine. In Google's words, "Fast Flip is a new reading experience that combines the best elements of print and online articles. Like a print magazine, Fast Flip lets you browse sequentially through bundles of recent news, headlines and popular topics, as well as feeds from individual top publishers."

Google partnered with the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Salon, Fast Company, ProPublica, and Newsweek to launch the lab. According to Google, partners will share revenue earned from contextual ads shown with articles. Google says that encouraging readers to read more news is "part of the solution" to the woes of the publishing industry, though the company does acknowledge that there is "no magic bullet."

It would appear that many certainly agree that Fast Flip isn't a magic bullet either way. Here are a few sample critiques of Fast Flip from around the web:

"It doesn't seem very fast and also doesn't flip pages, but slides them across the screen," says David Coursey at PC World. "I want to like anything Google does that makes life easier for readers, but Fast Flip can make news harder to access, not easier."

"I can say with absolute certainty that Fast Flip is fast and it will put more ads in front of the users who use it," says Clint Boulton, at eWeek. "But I'm not sure users are ready for Fast Flip to replace the way they currently view Google News -- link by link."

"Overall, Fast Flip just seems like a disappointing product," says Frederic Lardinois at Read Write Web. "The cooperation with content producers is interesting, though we wonder if a single AdSense unit on the site will really make newspapers any money."

Dan Frommer at Silicon Alley Insider has some particularly harsh words for the iPhone version of Fast Flip, which he deems useless. "Unlike on the desktop, you can't actually read anything. The text is far too small," he says. "And when you click 'zoom,' it doesn't zoom into a version of FastFlip where the text is larger, fitted to the iPhone's screen size, and actually readable. Instead, it expects you to pan around the page to read the text..No thanks!"

And like in the Blogosphere, there are of course varied opinions of Fast Flip floating around Twitter:

 

The important thing to remember here is that Fast Flip is just a Google Labs feature. That means it's not a proper release or a final product, though it is interesting that there are partners making money (allegedly) from the release. Google's own description of Google Labs:

Google Labs is a playground where our more adventurous users can play around with prototypes of some of our wild and crazy ideas and offer feedback directly to the engineers who developed them. Please note that Labs is the first phase in a lengthy product development process and none of this stuff is guaranteed to make it onto Google.com. While some of our crazy ideas might grow into the next Gmail or iGoogle, others might turn out to be, well, just plain crazy.

Most Google labs releases never make it out of labs status, though there have been exceptions. The fact that partnerships are involved could make the transition to actual release, and maybe a full-fledged feature of Google News, but as long as it's a lab, it's not going to be perfect.

Google has created a new web crawler specifically for Google News. What this means is that publishers who do not want Google News to index their content can more easily control that. That also applies to publishers who don’t wish to completely cut out indexing, but wish to limit/restrict certain elements of their content from being indexed.

Google offers this new crawler at a time when Google’s relationship with online news is a heavy focus of discussion throughout the industry, with the FTC’s meeting of the media minds taking place. This week Google already announced some changes to how it handles paid content (by offering a five-article limit for the "first click free" plan). Now the company appears to be further extending its olive branch to concerned publishers (whether or not that will be enough is another discussion).

In the past, publishers have been able to block Google from content via robots.txt and the Robots Extension Protocol (REP). They have also been able to keep content out of Google News and stay in Google Search, by using a contact form provided by Google. Now, Google is making it so publishers don’t even have to contact them.

"Now, with the news-specific crawler, if a publisher wants to opt out of Google News, they don’t even have to contact us – they can put instructions just for user-agent Googlebot-News in the same robots.txt file they have today," says Google News Senior Business Product Manager Josh Cohen. "In addition, once this change is fully in place, it will allow publishers to do more than just allow/disallow access to Google News. They’ll also be able to apply the full range of REP directives just to Google News. Want to block images from Google News, but not from Web Search? Go ahead. Want to include snippets in Google News, but not in Web Search? Feel free. All this will soon be possible with the same standard protocol that is REP."

"While this means even more control for publishers, the effect of opting out of News is the same as it’s always been," says Cohen. "It means that content won’t be in Google News or in the parts of Google that are powered by the News index. For example, if a publisher opts out of Google News, but stays in Web Search, their content will still show up as natural web search results, but they won’t appear in the block of news results that sometimes shows up in Web Search, called Universal search, since those come from the Google News index."

Cohen says Google News users shouldn’t notice any difference in their experience with the service. It will be interesting to see the reaction from disgruntled publishers, and whether or not this will make any significant difference in how they view Google News.

Related Articles:

> Google Changes How it Handles Paid Content

> Minds of the Media Gather to Discuss Future of News

> Google Okay With Blocking News Corp.

> Is it Really Crazy to Block Google?

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.

"Also, you can now reach your favorite sections, discover new ones, find articles and play videos in fewer clicks," says Google's Mobile News Team. "If you are an existing Google News reader on desktop, you will find that all of your personalizations are honored in this mobile version too."

Google News for mobile is currently available in 29 languages and 70 editions.

In other recent Google-related mobile news, AdMob, which Google recently acquired, has unveiled a new interactive video ad unit for the iPhone. Google also acquired Gizmo5, a VoIP firm, which will see VoIP integration with Google Voice, and Google Latitude introduced location history and smart alerts.

On the news search front, today Yahoo began incorporating tweets into its search results for select news stories.

Related Articles:

> Google Further Customizes the News Experience

> Google Adding Some Visual Flare to News?

> Google Adds "Real-Time" Suggestions to Google News

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%.

"BBC News ranked as the 21st most visited News and Media website in US during August, while the Daily Mail was 47th and the BBC Homepage 65th," says Hitwise's Robin Goad. Other British sites in the US News and Media top 200 last month included: the Telegraph (71st), the FT (115th), The Sun (117th), Times Online (131st) and the Guardian (134th)."

Goad names sites like Digg and the Drudge Report as being key for driving US audiences to UK news sites. Google is the biggest driver of US traffic to British News sites, accounting for 13.5% of visits in August, and Drudge follows this, accounting for 10.6%. In third place is Google News, accounting for 5.3%.

According to Goad, email also plays a major role in driving US traffic to UK news sites - Yahoo! Mail (2.5%), Gmail (1.6%) and Hotmail (1.4%) all appeared in the top 10.

On a state-by-state basis, Californians are driving the most traffic to British news sites, followed by New Yorkers. "Slightly more surprising is the list of states that over index most as visitors to UK-based news sites, with Arizona and New Mexico ranking second and third after California," says Goad. "Residents of Wyoming are the least likely to visit."

I'd be curious to know what kind of traffic social networks like Twitter and Facebook have driven to these sites.

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

"Last week was a bumper week for celebrity news stories (unfortunately for sad reasons in many cases), and Google News UK was a top recipient for many of the most popular terms," says Hitwises's Robin Goad. "The site was the second biggest recipient of UK searches for ‘patrick swayze’ and ‘kanye west’ (picking up 8.25% and 8.26% of traffic respectively), third for ‘katie price’ (9.29%) and fourth for ‘keith floyd’ (5.28%)."

According to Hitwise, last week was Google News UK's busiest week ever, with visits increasing 71% and the site ranking 28th most popular overall (up from 46th the previous week).

Google News also got a good deal of attention last week when Google formally announced Google Fast Flip, a new way for users to read the news in a more visual, magazine-like way. This feature is still in "lab" status, and is not a full-fledged feature of Google News yet, but it has received mixed reviews.

Another piece of Google News-related news is that Google has recently started distinguishing between blogs and other news sources in a new way. I would have to say this system is a bit flawed though. More on that here.

As Google News reaches new heights in popularity in the UK, UK publishers may want to consider some SEO tips for ranking on the site. In addition, Google News has recently added real-time suggestions.

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:



The system clearly has some flaws. Notice for example, in the above screenshot, Marketing Pilgrim is not labeled as a blog. Nothing against Marketing Pilgrim, but it is clearly a blog. This is even acknowledged on Marketing Pilgrim's own about page.



Now let's look at this sample New York Times piece that is listed in Google News results (obviously not as a blog):



Look at the style of this article. It's nothing more than a couple paragraphs that link out to none other than a New York Times-based BLOG. Now I'm not insinuating that the New York Times is merely a blog. Clearly it is a well-established, respected, and historical publication. But their site certainly has some blog-like tendencies, not to mention actual blogs (like Bits, which is linked to in the above example, and clearly considers itself a blog).



So I guess this opens up the ever-popular debate about what is classified as a blog. Is it based on journalism credentials? If so, then are you sure all of the publications without the blog label meet this criteria? What do you think? Share your thoughts.

This is no doubt a move aimed at appeasing the big publishers, at least to some extent. Still, I think the system has some holes.