[7] In 2020, Google announced they would be spending US$1 billion to work with publishers to create Showcases, "a new format for insightful feature stories".

As of September 2015[update], service is offered in the following 35 languages: Arabic, Bengali, Bulgarian, Cantonese, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Indonesian, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malayalam, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.

[13] On December 1, 2009, Google announced changes to their "first click free" program,[14][clarification needed] which has been running since 2008 and allows users to find and read articles behind a paywall.

[15] Google on December 1, 2009 changed their policy to allow a limit of five articles per day, in order to protect publishers from abuse.

[17] In October 2017, this program was replaced with a "flexible sampling" model in which each publisher chooses how many, if any, free articles were allowed.

It now uses a card format for grouping related news stories, and as summarized by Engadget, "doesn't look like a search results page anymore", removing text snippets and blue links.

[32] In 2007, a preliminary injunction and then a Belgian court ruled that Google did not have the right to display the lead paragraph from French-language Belgian news sources when Google aggregated news stories,[33] nor to provide free access to cached copies of the full content ("in cache" feature),[34] due to both copyright and database rights.

[36] According to the 2009 Report on the outlook for copyright in the EU: With the Google-Copiepresse judgment of 13 February 2007, on the other hand, the Belgian judge ruled that a copy of a webpage memorised by the Google server and the existence of a link giving public access to the same webpage contravene the rights of reproduction and communication to the public.

The same judgement does not consider the exception in respect of quotations for purposes such as criticism or review provided for in Article 5.3.d to be applicable to the Google News service.

In July 2011, Copiepress publications were restored on Google News after they requested so and renounced any complaint based on the judgement.

[46] In 2012, Brazil's National Association of Newspapers (AJN) jointly pulled out of allowing their content to be shown on Google News.

Users used to be able to customize the displayed sections, their location on the page, and how many stories are visible with a JavaScript-based drag and drop interface.

Stories from different editions of Google News can be combined to form one personalized page, with the options stored in a cookie.

A revamped version of Google News was introduced in May 2018 that included artificial intelligence features to help users find relevant information.

An expansion of the service was announced on September 8, 2008, when Google News began to offer indexed content from scanned newspapers.

[53] The depth of chronological coverage varies; beginning in 2008, the entire content of the New York Times back to its founding in 1851 has been available.

[56] In August 2011, the "News Archive Advanced Search" functionality was removed entirely, again generating complaints from regular users who found that the changes rendered the service unusable.