Google News for Spain, aggregated headlines and snippets redirecting to the originating sites, will close on December 16th 2014 ahead of new regulations being introduced in Spain in January 2015.
The site collates news relating to Spain, shows snippets and then redirects the user to the originating site to read further. Basically an online news feedreader, but on a global scale.
Spain wants to charge Google for providing these headlines and snippets, the so-called ‘Google tax’. Google does not feel that this is fair as the service does not provide revenue – there are no advertisements in Google News – and has therefore decided to stop the service.
In November, Germany’s biggest news publisher, Axel Springer, scrapped a move to block Google from running snippets of articles from its newspapers, saying that the experiment had caused traffic to its sites to plunge.