Google News Still Available In Spain Despite Closure Deadline

News outlets such as the Wall Street Journal and AP are reporting that Google News España has shut down. However it appears to still be up and available on the site.

As Barry Schwartz points out, if you visit news.google.es you’re directed to the following help page. The page offers an explanation and apology:

As of this morning, I was still able to see news on the site and get news-formatted search results on the homepage:

I assume that the above pages will change later to day or this week to redirect to the notice and explanation above. But for now, at least outside Spain, “Noticias” appears to still be operating.

Google made the decision to shutter its news site last week after a “Google tax” masquerading as a strict Spanish “anti-piracy” law passed. The law will go into effect on January 1 and would have required Google to start compensating publishers whose content appeared in Google News Spain. News content is still available through the main search results in Spain.

In response to the decision the Spanish news publisher association (AEDE), which lobbied for passage of the new law, is asking the government and EU to compel Google to keep News open in Spain as a matter of public interest.

Postscript: Since the shut down earlier today, according to data from Chartbeat (via Mathew Ingram), Spanish newspaper sites are seeing a pretty significant decline in “external traffic” (i.e., Google News) but not a similar decline in overall traffic:

According to Chartbeat’s data, overall traffic to Spanish publishers hasn’t fallen by as much, but the amount of external traffic has declined sharply, while the amount of internal traffic — coming from other Spanish publishers — has risen. Schwartz said this suggests that readers are moving between different Spanish news sites more than they did previously, rather than coming to them from links at Google News and other sources.