Macworld covers along with other IDG publications a "secret" that's been very public for months: in spite of action by Agence France-Presse against Google to remove AFP news from the Google News service, AFP content shows up regularly in Google News results - from its channel partners, primarily, but in some instances from AFP's own site (sample query). While the vast majority of AFP content seems to come from other sites taking its feed, some casual testing would seem to point to no specific constraints on perusing AFP's site directly. Google is apparently under no legal action at this time that would restrain them from crawling this content, according to the Macworld article, but in the meantime it's hard to imagine that the search results being provided by Google News are not benefiting AFP's syndicated news clients - the main focus of AFP's concerns in its complaint against Google.

It's probably fair to chalk up most of Google's crawls of AFP's own site as flaws in its algorithms that need to be tuned, which leaves AFP' s syndicated product the proud beneficiary of free advertising via Google News. I suspect that this fact is not lost on AFP and that this may account for the relative silence from their side on this matter in recent months. Perhaps the IDG articles will force them to brandish the sabre for a bit, but for the most part news suppliers seem to have come to peace with search engines and have tuned their publicly available content to suit their marketing strategies accordingly. If AFP forbids their syndication partners from exposing their news in any great way to search engines it will doubtless reduce the appeal of their content to those clients. So score one for the power of search engines to enhance the value of syndicated content - for now.