Though there are hundreds of News aggregators available on net, Google News is quite distinct due to the number of articles it linked and its powerful algorithm in ranking and clubbing the News articles. Now what experts called as a landmark move, Google News has signed agreements with four major news agencies by which the leading search engine can display full articles and photos owned by the news agencies in their News site. The agencies includes Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, UK Press Association and the Canadian Press. The financial terms of these deals were not disclosed.

AP and AFP which partnered with Google now had raised copyright infringement over the search engine earlier. It is very clear that from its experience it faced with Youtube’s content, now Google prefers to pay for licensing over legal battle.

Google announced that it will continue linking other articles from the other sources as usual and ranking of news article will have no favor to the articles of its partner agencies. Google also confirms that it has no plans to run ads in the news site.

At the same time, Google had discussed about duplicate detection, by which only original copy of the article will be listed and the links of the articles in the other media sites which uses the same agency news story will not be included in the listing. This move will heavily affect news papers, magazine and small websites, which depends on these agencies for news stories, as part of their links will not be listed in Google News which in turn have a huge impact in their traffic and ad revenues.

On readers perspective, this is a welcome move, as he/she can read the complete content in the same site itself and also duplicate/multiple listing of a same story will not be there while searching.

No prize to guess that Google will soon start partnering with different news agencies across the Globe. The bandwidth of the news agencies in collecting news along with Google’s user base will help to make Google News site as the single largest news source.

Bottomline: A biggest threat to the News media begins..