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Newspapers are angry at Google News' attempts to keep them relevant and in business. Displaying the headline and providing a link to the story on a newspaper's site is deemed theft by many in the newspaper business.

Google is supposed to make it easier for newspaper readers to find content online. But some in the industry are questioning whether it makes business sense to allow Google to use their material for free.

"If all of the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal their content, how profitable would Google be?" Sam Zell, the new owner of the Tribune Company, asked reporters during a speech at Stanford University last month. The Tribune Company operates the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune.

Zell didn't wait for the reporters to reply, according to The Washington Post. "Not very," he said.

Newspapers want Google to pay for the privilege of linking to them.

Google's position about paying newspapers to index headlines has never wavered. "We don't pay to index news content," said a Google spokesman in an e-mail.

Some newspapers have sued over Google linking to them.

But not everyone agrees Google News is legal. A Belgium court ruled against Google last year after a newspaper association there sued the search engine. The newspaper group asserted that by offering snippets and headlines from their publications, Google violated copyright law.

Google immediately stopped indexing stories belonging to the association's members. This month, however, links to the Belgium newspapers reappeared. Google and the newspapers said they settled their differences on some issues and were trying to resolve others. Last month, Paris-based news agency Agence France-Presse reached a licensing agreement to settle its copyright lawsuit against Google that allows Google to post AFP content, including news stories and photographs, on Google News, as well as on other Google services.

Last August, Google announced an agreement with the Associated Press that allows it to use AP news and photos, but not in Google News. The content will be part of an undisclosed service under development.

While some in newspaper circles point to the Belgium court ruling and the content deals with AP and AFP as a sign Google may be willing to pay for content, Google fans and bloggers interpreted the news quite differently. To them, it was obvious that the Belgium group had agreed to settle--even after winning its court case--because they discovered that they needed Google's traffic more than the fees that could be generated from news snippets.

Observers note that with newspapers receiving about 25 percent of their traffic from search engines, losing Google's traffic had to sting.