After having spent almost 8 years in the shadows, well in December 2014 Google News closed its doors in Spainthe search engine section that shows the latest news returns to the country as announced at the end of 2021.
Both the modification of the Intellectual Property Law, as well as the transposition of the European copyright directive, has reopened the doors to Google News.
You can now enjoy Google News in Spain again
Thanks to the latest updates carried out by Google in its search engine for Spain, all users residing in the country can access this service through a dedicated website.
As the days go by, Google will add a specific application, both on Android and iOS, which will allow you to enjoy this section without having to enter the aforementioned web page.
Why Google News had left Spain?
With the different changes related to the media law that had been carried out in Spain, Google had to pay compensation to news websites included in that section.
Google appealed this “tax” that I had to pay, but before the refusal of the Spanish government at that timethe directors of the company had no choice but to remove this section of the search engine in question, thus leaving millions of users without the possibility of accessing the latest news.
reaching an agreement, Google will no longer be forced to pay them directly by lawalthough you will have to negotiate case by case and reach specific agreements in order to index content from other media in Google News.
We will have Google News for a while
Looking closely at the whole thing, we can say that Google wants to recover its good relationship with the local media. The Vice President of Google Spain is the one who has made it clear:
Journalists are critical in helping us understand important events as they unfold. Leaving a huge community of Internet users without Google News was not our intention.
Without much more to add, it is interesting to mention that following the closure of Google News in our country, traffic to Spanish publishers’ websites fell by 10%a number that greatly affected the local media (especially the smaller ones).
