According to Google Blog, Google News is coming out of “Beta”. Not sure what the difference is, other than the word Beta removed from the logo, but I think it’s good news (No pun intended).
I use Google News every day. I like it as it offers a fairly International view of world events and neatly displays news on the page. Other news services present simular information, but I like the straight forward layout that Google News offers. Using it and configuring it is easy to do.
What I’m Curious about is: How do they expect to generate Revenue from the Service?
Most of the news content has provisions that you can’t insert Advertisement banners when you redisplay the news. At a guess, I’d bet that Google resells the information they gather when people hit the links on the page. This might be a concern about one’s privacy, especially since the Department of Justice is suing Google for information on what people are searching for (Can you Say “Big Brother” boys and girls?) all in the Name of fighting “Porn”. The fact is that people give up thier privacy everyday, often without realizing it. I’m not advocating the sacrafice of ones privacy, but I think there are Gray Areas. Preseting the News in the fashion that Google does takes resources to set up. To pay for these resources, you sacrifice a little of your privacy.
You could read about privacy Concerns on this Iafrica.com page retrieved via news.google.com
In Any Case, this is another good service that Google has presented.
