EQUTE — The Fair Syndication Consortium, a group of publishers seeking syndication rights, published a new report on who is profiting from unlicensed newspaper content. [PDF]

It looks like Google is making a lot of money off of unlicensed content, and so is Yahoo.

The 30 day survey had some interesting results, if not staggering:

This new survey will no doubt add fuel to the fire currently growing under Google in regard to their aggregating services. While it really isn’t new news, the numbers the survey shows are somewhat shocking.

EQUTE — The next move in Google News is designed to make publishers and readers happy with integrated results from Google Fast Flip.

Fast Flip is Google’s article reading helper, which gives publishers more space to show off their site instead of turning every article into a hyperlink like Google News alone does. The practice was riling some publishers that said Google News turned their hard work into a commodity for Google instead of the publisher.

Google responded to blogger Steve Rubel saying that the integration was one of their many search tests.

Hi Steve, I work with the Google News team. At Google, we run anywhere from 50 to 200 experiments at any given time on our websites all over the world. A few weeks ago we started running a few small ones exploring how we might incorporate results from Fast Flip into Google News. From these tests we hope to learn whether including Fast Flip results in Google News would provide a good experience for users and news publishers. More information about how Google runs experiments can be found here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/08/search-experiments-large-and-small.html

Google hasn’t said when the new feature will be rolling out, but it could appease a great many publishers. Speculation also says that the change could build the framework for creating paywalls to articles — maybe Rupert Murdoch won’t leave Google.

EQUTE — A now famous veto letter from Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger that contained a hidden message directed a lawmaker who heckled the governor.

The letter could be found on just about any news site the day it was uncovered, and “F You,” “F%^& You,” “F— You,” and every other trick was used to cover up the vulgar word. But Google neglected to cover it up, allowing f*ck to make it into the top results for Google News.

Google soon changed some things so that the four-letter word wouldn’t show up, but not before people began complaining and Google’s squeaky clean image looked like it had Tourette’s.

Google also issued an explanation:

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. As you my know, Google News is highly unusual in that it offers a news service compiled solely by computer algorithms without human intervention. There are no human editors at Google selecting or grouping the headlines and pictures, and no individual decides which stories and images get top placement. This automation is what makes Google News a valuable source of information on the important issues of the day. We are always working to improve our service, and your feedback will help us in this process.

There has been a lot of speculation about what Google Caffeine will do to search rankings — will it be the Google slap-apocalypse?

Most likely, no.

The people at WebProNews sat down with Matt Cutts from Google to examine the issue. You can watch the video at WebProNews.

His main points were that most people won’t notice a change when Google Caffeine rolls out. He also made a point to say that it would be rolled out slowly and would be tweaked based on user feedback.

At the core, Google Caffeine is only an update to how Google actually crawl’s Web sites, so there should be no quality-score adjustment that could hurt online marketers.

From the article:

This infrastructure modification will lay the foundation for future indexing changes and will also allow for the expansion of website speed and size. Incidentally, it could even provide a stronger architecture for potential real-time and semantic efforts.

Google Caffeine could be laying the framework for the upcoming Google Wave.