For users, Google's plan for "universal search" makes an enormous amount of sense. Of course, website links, news headlines, book excerpts and video thumbnails should be included in the same set of results. Duh. But there's one unacknowledged risk in this approach: it makes Google more vulnerable to legal grief, or the threat of it.

Part of Google's defense, in indexing external articles without explicit permission, is that it doesn't profit at the expense of the news organizations from which it grabs headlines and digests — because Google does not run advertising on Google News. (That was one of the arguments used to knock down Sam Zell, a wannabe newspaper mogul who dared criticize Google.)

However, Mountain View profits richly from ads placed on its main search results; the more those "universal" results include news headlines, the greater the claim of news organizations to a share of the revenues. Sites can still, of course, opt out of indexing, but Google's case just got a little weaker.