Well, I can't argue against what you're saying in your sub-comment here, Google is a for-profit service and provides traffic to other sites, and it's entirely o

Well, I can't argue against what you're saying in your sub-comment here, Google is a for-profit service and provides traffic to other sites, and it's entirely optional via robots.txt whether people want to participate in being indexed. The problem enters with the insidious tracking that Google uses, that pushes their revenue per 1000 searches to way above any other search provider, alongside their monopoly position in many countries that allows them to be the default search choice in pretty much every major browser and device that's going to search for anything. Instead of being the agnostic middle-man as search used to be, Google is encroaching on publishers ability to be sustainable propositions, all the while taking their content. In the UK, Google has 95% of the search market, and 50% of content discovery is via search (sorry, no source at hand). Basically the choice of publishers is to cut off their arm while content aggregators suck the value from their unique content. It's not exactly an elevator pitch to prove the point, but there's countless parties that have elaborated along these lines. Surely there is room for a search engine purely to point you to other places on the web, is where I stand. Google serving news is just them providing a reason for you to load up google.com rather than any other place, which clearly they've massively succeeded in doing, being a portal rather than a middle man.