• The New York Times, Tuesday, June 24, 2008 12:16 PM

While news organizations continue to worry about what Google is doing to their business, the company is far from achieving the kind of dominant position in news that it has in other areas.

Six years after its start, Google News appears to be stuck in neutral and struggling to keep up with rivals. Several online news experts say Google News has changed little, especially when compared with services like Google Maps and Gmail, which add new features at a rapid pace.

While it is clearly past the experimental stage, Google News still shows no ads, and there are no signs that Google is serious about making money from the site directly. Google executives defend the news site, saying traffic is not a paramount goal. Google News, they say, helps the company produce better search results and helps users find news sources that they might not know about otherwise. People close to the company said that concerns about antagonizing news publishers have guided some decisions at Google News, most notably the decision not to place ads on the site. Like some other Google projects, Google News has at times also struggled internally to get the resources it needed, these people said.

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