Here is Josh Cohen’s announce­ment about Google News:

Today we’re launch­ing a new fea­ture on Google News that will help you quickly and eas­ily find ori­ginal stor­ies from news pub­lish­ers — includ­ing stor­ies from some of the top news agen­cies in the world, such as the Asso­ci­ated Press, Agence France-Presse, UK Press Asso­ci­ation and the Cana­dian Press — and go dir­ectly to the ori­ginal source to read more.

Our goal has always been to offer users as many dif­fer­ent per­spect­ives on a story from as many dif­fer­ent sources as pos­sible, which is why we include thou­sands of sources from around the world in Google News. How­ever, if many of those stor­ies are actu­ally the exact same art­icle, it can end up bury­ing those dif­fer­ent per­spect­ives. Enter “duplic­ate detec­tion.” Duplic­ate detec­tion means we’ll be able to dis­play a bet­ter vari­ety of sources with less duplic­a­tion. Instead of 20 “dif­fer­ent” art­icles (which actu­ally used the exact same con­tent), we’ll show the defin­it­ive ori­ginal copy and give credit to the ori­ginal journ­al­ist. (We launched a sim­ilar fea­ture in Sort-by-Date and got great feed­back about it.) Of course, if you want to see all the duplic­ates on other pub­lisher web­sites with addi­tional ana­lysis and con­text, they’re only a click away.

By remov­ing duplic­ate art­icles from our res­ults, we’ll be able to sur­face even more stor­ies and view­points from journ­al­ists and pub­lish­ers from around the world. This change will provide more room on Google News for pub­lish­ers’ most highly val­ued con­tent: ori­ginal con­tent. Pre­vi­ously, some of this con­tent could be harder to find on Google News, and as a res­ult of this change, you’ll have easier access to more of this con­tent, and pub­lish­ers will likely receive more traffic to their ori­ginal content.

Because the Asso­ci­ated Press, Agence France-Presse, UK Press Asso­ci­ation and the Cana­dian Press don’t have a con­sumer web­site where they pub­lish their con­tent, they have not been able to bene­fit from the traffic that Google News drives to other pub­lish­ers. As a res­ult, we’re host­ing it on Google News.

Duplic­ate detec­tion isn’t just for our news agency part­ners — it also enables you to find the ori­ginal copy of art­icles from pub­lish­ers and news agen­cies that have their own des­tin­a­tion site. For these pub­lish­ers, we’ll con­tinue to show just a snip­pet of the story and a link, so you can read the full story on their site.

Inter­est­ing. These agen­cies don’t have con­sumer sites, eh? AP con­tent seems to prop up Yahoo! News. And they are agen­cies, their whole busi­ness pro­pos­i­tion is mak­ing money from selling on to people who then edit/re-write/sell on their stuff. So another change in the rules of the game.