[kevingadd]

Indexes don't work without consuming the news content first in order to build the index, right? So it's reasonable to argue that a news search index is a derived work that draws some amount of value from the source news content. Without the news sites offering their news for free to google's spider, google's index would be useless. You could make a similar argument for aggregators since they usually display excerpts and thumbnails.

Ranking seems harder to justify.

[ethbr1]

It does beg the cascading question too.

What if I create a search product that directs you to a site, based on information gleaned from another site?

Trivial example: a "Top 10 Topics in the News Today" list of Wikipedia links, based on scraping a news site's front page daily

On the one hand, "It's free info and scraping should be allowed." On the other hand, if everyone did that, it'd highjack all of the news site's visitors, depriving it of revenue and destroying the very resource it's built on.

[Spivak]

This line of reasoning is dangerously close to saying that mapmakers need to pay license fees for your land to be shown on a map because "without the land your map wouldn't be very valuable."