Visit from Google

We had a visitor in todays class, the Norwegian CEO of Google came to class and we had a discussion about how Google managed their international business. It was very very interesting and I asked a question about how they perceive a lot of the critisism that they have taken - foremost in the Swedish press - about their alleged cannibalization on news sources. I got an answer that said that the reason why they often are accused of that is because they often choose to link their news back to the original source. The example that Jan (the CEO of Google Norway) came up with, was that if VG (a Norwegian tabloid) write about some obscure occurrance in Northern Norway, then Google News often generates a lead to the original story, often depicted in a local newspaper. Hence, many of the smaller news providers around in Norway has increased the traffic to their web pages to their websites. I cannot judge if this is "fair" or "not fair", but I use Google News all the time, and I think its a great tool.