• by David Goetzl  @dgoetzl, February 19, 2010

The executive in charge of the controversial Google News page -- at least to Rupert Murdoch -- said Google is simply pushing content to Web sites, which is ready for them to monetize.

"We certainly see the value, and we think most of the publishers do too," Josh Cohen said Friday at the PaidContent 2010 event in New York.

The aggregation site provides links to stories on thousands of news sites, giving newspapers and others "a real opportunity" to earn more ad dollars or charge visitors, says Cohen, the senior business product manager for Google News.

Publishers that want the Google-generated traffic may look for ways to have links to their sites appear more prominently. But Google News is designed to outwit their tinkering with search engine optimization.

Cohen said a proprietary algorithm is used to rank stories, which looks for the most "original content." That supplies a certain editorial integrity.

Otherwise, he said, "it won't be the most relevant information, and then our users will go somewhere else that does a better job."

Google News doesn't make money by itself. If someone just visited the site and then clicked through to, say, The Sacramento Bee, Google wouldn't make a cent.

It can, however, benefit from an umbrella effect. If people view the headlines and then shift to the Google search engine to book a vacation, for example, Google may earn a profit. Also, if a person searches for a news topic directly on the main search engine, article links appear next to sponsored links.

Murdoch, the CEO of News Corp., has threatened to yank content on his company's Web sites from being indexed by Google News or the search engine. News Corp. owns some of the world's most well-known papers: The Wall Street Journal, Times of London, and New York Post.

Murdoch has charged Google with allowing people to circumvent a site's pay wall. The WSJ already has a pay site, and all Murdoch news sites apparently are going that way. Murdoch has indicated when that's complete, there will be a News Corp.-Google split.

Google does require that articles it indexes be free to users, but it has recently instituted a policy in which a site can restrict access to only five free articles per day, then begin charging. Google will also label articles that aren't free as "subscription."

The New York Times has recently said it will move to a pay model. At the PaidContent event, its head of digital operations, Martin Nisenholtz, said that Google's model of five free clicks is one the paper could adopt.

"We're looking at that," he said. "We think that's a productive move on their part."