Normally, as any SEO guru could tell you, Google’s algorithm punishes scraper sites. These are sites that don’t add any new content to the Internet, but just have programs that find new material on a variety of other sites, then effectively copy and paste them into their own site. The creation of duplicate content or slightly modified duplicate content, is therefore discounted by Google to punish sites that don’t come up with original material.

That is, of course, except for news.google.com. It is a directory for various news feeds, and a site I use quite often. It also does not generate any content and is, in that sense, a sort of scraper site. It’s also got a PR (Pagerank - Google’s official ranking of how important a page is, from 0 to 10) of 9. That’s really, really good for a site that isn’t responsible for adding any content to the ‘net. I guess you could be a site for my dog fluffy with midi files embedded and animated GIFs everywhere and still be a PR 9 if you had fluffy.google.com. I wonder if they’d give me that…