Remember Peter Osnos? He was gunned down for suggesting that Google be asked to pay for news content. (To me a least, an argument roughly akin to beating on Ida Tarbell for suggesting that Standard Oil be broken up.)

Remember these arguments?

# Google carries no newspaper content itself, beyond headlines, a few words and links. It sends people to content on newspaper sites–in fact, roughly 20-30 percent of traffic to most newspaper sites comes from Google. In other words, people aren’t reading newspaper stories on Google; they’re using it to find stories on newspaper sites. Odds are they wouldn’t have gotten to those sites in any other way. Newspapers should be thanking Google for that traffic.

# Google News, no doubt a big part of Osnos’ imaginary bogeyman and a key driver of that traffic to newspaper sites, carries no advertising. Check it out.

And again:

Let’s take one of the most obvious points: Google News doesn’t carry advertising, so there are no “advertising revenues generated by use of their stories” for the news industry to get “a significant slice” of (there is referral revenue, but that’s a step removed, and requires a different argument).

Now?

If you’re in the US, starting today you may notice something a bit different when you search Google News.

Last November, we announced plans to begin experimenting with ads on a number of Google properties, including news query refinements within Google search. Today, we’re continuing a similar experience for users by introducing ads on Google News search-results pages in the US. What this means is that when you enter a query like iPhone or Kindle into the Google News search box, you’ll see text ads alongside your News search results – similar to what you see on regular Google searches or Google Book Search.

Ho hum.