Google claims news is worthless to its ad business after test involving 1% of search results in eight EU markets

Google has reported the results of an experiment it ran which removed news from search results for 1% of users for 2.5 months in eight* markets in Europe — claiming the results show that news is essentially worthless to Google’s ad business. The search giant conducted the test because European copyright law requires it to pay news publishers for reusing snippets of their content. But how much is displaying news worth? Google argues that publishers “vastly overestimate” the value of their journalism to its b ...