by Search Copywriter
D. Warburton
D. Warburton
Google has become the subject of an antitrust investigation after publishers in Italy accused the Mountain View giant of dropping their sites from its search engine.The Times reports that Google's increasing dominance across online markets makes them a target of constant scrutiny by antitrust authorities. This latest complaint was directed by Italian newspapers who claim to have witnessed their websites rapidly falling off Google's radar after they declined to allow their stories to be published to the Google News service.
Antitrust regulators raided the offices of Google Italy to investigate the claim.
Senior Business Product Manager of Google News, Josh Cohen has responded in Google's European Public Privacy Blog that Google is "still reviewing this claim," but stresses that inclusion in Google News is entirely at the behest of publishers.
Mr Cohen states: "We respect the wishes of content owners, which is why we've made it easy to opt out of our services."
Google News collects and publishes stories from over 25,000 news sites, but some publishers have claimed that their stories featuring in Google News leads to fewer users visiting source websites. Mr Cohen emphasises the advantages of publishing to Google News for attracting significant attention to publishers' sites, stating:
"[W]hen it comes to Google News, we have far more requests for inclusion than for removal. That's because publishers understand that the traffic generated by Google News, and services like it, provide valuable traffic."
Mr Cohen also revealed that Google News sends over 1 billion clicks per month to news publishers.
There are clear advantages for publishers who collaborate with Google News to receive greater visibility for their news stories. The online news hub possesses numerous advantages over traditional printed media, such as the ability to re-crawl news stories for periodic updates, meaning that Google News looks set to continue its climb to a dominant position in the publishing field.
