Google defies their own "send you away" strategy with Google News

Instead of sending people to any site hosting content from Press Association, Associated Press, Canadian Press and Agence France-Presse, Google has decided to license articles and host them directly. The pages hosting the articles are plain -- you get the article you want, and basically nothing else (not even ads).

This move has been in the making for several years -- and frankly, it is hard to understand why it took so long. Google has the infrastructure to store these articles, and it gives them all kinds of flexibility they never had before. For example, they could add features such as live chat or comments on these hosted article pages if they wanted.

There is the possibility that other sites that host this same content will be slightly ticked off now that traffic coming from Google will completely disappear -- potentially causing quite a bit of lost ad revenue. It will be interesting to see how Google handles the backlash when it happens.