Google becomes a newspaper

SEARCH ENGINE outfit Google has decided that it is better to become a newspaper than it is to be sued for nicking all of its content, reports The Wall Street Journal.

Over the weekend, Google started hosting material produced by the Associated Press and three other news services on its own Web site.

In the good old days, Google would pack readers off to the original site, but all that went pear shaped when a few news agencies took the search engine to the cleaners. Hundreds of stories and photographs distributed each day by the AP, Agence France-Presse, the Press Association in the United Kingdom and the Canadian Press will appear on Google.

There is a fear that the move could reduce traffic to newspaper and broadcast companies' Web sites. The old newspapers have made a fortune from advertising news agency copy under their mastheads. µ