• CNET News.com, Wednesday, May 23, 2007 11:30 AM

Newspaper publishers are taking Google to task for indexing their headlines and offering synopses of their stories without paying for it.Sam Zell, new owner of Tribune Company asked, "If all of the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal their content, how profitable would Google be?" The answer is not very. Imagine if Web publishers charged Google a per page fee for indexing their content?

It's an interesting question, and the fact that American publishers haven't asked it until now is vexing, say print industry analysts. "The search engines are supposed to be sending traffic to newspapers. But on the other hand, [journalism] is hard work," says Aly Colon, an instructor at The Poynter Institute. "There is going to be some sort of attempt by newspapers to figure out how they can be fully compensated for their work."

Google, however, would trash those claims; in all likelihood, the search giant has driven more traffic to newspaper publisher sites than it's taken away. The real problem for publishers is that search engines make the competition for eyeballs stiffer. Not only do major news outlets report on the same stories, but they're also competing with blogs, aggregators and social networks. But that's not Google's problem, and it's certainly something that charging search engines for indexing pages would fix.

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