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A comment on Google may shut down its news service in Europe. Parent comment

Re:Google may shut down its news service in Europe by CaptainZapp on Wednesday November 21, 2018 @09:20AM (#18502825)
I agree with all that except it should be clearer that Google doesn't gain anything (except PR?) from actually running Google News.

I'm pretty sure they use News as part of their tracking efforts. Being an extremely tight lipped and secretive company this point would be extremely hard to prove.

But given their history of shutting down unprofitable properties I would be surprised if they just provide this service for altruistic reasons.

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Re:Google may shut down its news service in Europe by knorker on Wednesday November 21, 2018 @11:36AM (#18503861)
> But given their history of shutting down unprofitable properties I would be surprised if they just provide this service for altruistic reasons.

Google News was ostensibly started for altruistic reasons, because on 2001-09-11 ALL news websites went down under the load.

In 2018 news websites maybe are more behind cloudflare/akamai and would be able to handle load, so less relevant technically.

But to say that altruistic reason would surprise you because of this history is extremely cynical. Even by my standards.

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