The European press got itself in a bitter battle against Google. In a nutshell, legacy media want money from the search engine: first, for the snippets of news it grabs and feeds into its Google News service; second, on a broader basis, for all the referencing Google builds with news media material. In Germany, the Bundestag is working on a bill to force all news aggregators to pay their toll; in France, the executive is pushing for a negotiated solution before year-end. Italy is more or less following the same path. For a detailed and balanced background, see this Eric Pfanner story in the International Herald Tribune.In the controversy, an argument keeps rearing its head. According to the proponents of a “Google Tax”, media contents greatly improve the contextualization of advertising. Therefore, the search engine giant ought to pay for such value. Financially speaking, without media articles Google would not perform as well it does, hence the European media hunt for a piece of the pie.Last week, rooting for facts, I spoke with several people possessing deep knowledge of Google’s inner mechanics; they ranged from Search Engine Marketing specialists to a Stanford Computer Science professor who taught Larry Page and Sergey Brin back in the mid-90′s.

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