Looks like Google may be getting themselves into some potential down the road if this story (http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/05/20/google-news-the-end-of-news-indexing-as-we-know-it/) is true. Basically, Google is making deals with some UK news sites to license content for use on Google News. If that is the case, you know that other news sites will start clamoring for a piece of the pie, as there's already been plenty of legal issues raised with the creation of Google News in the first place. But Techcrunch also argues that this may be a different situation because of different levels of fair use in the U.S. versus Europe.

My guess is that Google are planning a significant upgrade to Google News in the near future – something that contains more content and is more of a news portal than the current search based Google News.

Google have been quietly signing deals with various news providers (like the AP) over the last 6 months which should give them more access to content than basic snippets.

i'd love it if turned out to be a much bigger revamp – imagine if you could search and read EVERY issue of say the Times of London going back to 1900. Heck, why not *EVERY* newspaper – all of those archives now stuck on microfilm and undigitised.

Google has the digitisation and storage capabilities to do that.

I'd love it if Google surprised the heck out of us with suddenly launching a newspaper archive site.
(imagine what that would do to the world of historical research, for example...)

<< I'd love it if Google surprised the heck out of us with suddenly launching a newspaper archive site. >>

Surprise!

http://news.google.com/archivesearch

<< Basically, Google is making deals with some UK news sites to license content for use on Google News. >>

Google denies this.

http://www.journalism.co.uk/news/story3321.shtml