Media stories of note for Thursday, March 28, 2013:

Danny Sullivan, writing for SearchEngineLand, notes that Google has weighed into the controversy involving content sponsored by advertisers that commingles with news. It wants publishers to segregate this non-news content carefully so that it does not end up as part of what Google News ranks. If they don't, Google is threatening to exclude their organizations from Google News, a measure that would significantly affect their traffic and referrals. 

Add Portugal to the list of countries whose news organizations are asking Google to compensate them for running their content through its search engine.  News organizations in Portugal are suffering their worst economic results in 40 years. Google has rejected the initial demands, Reuters reports, but negotiations are continuing. Google has struck support deals in other European countries in recent months.

R.B. Brenner, writing for Poynter.org, provides a tip sheet on how newsrooms can create plans to deal with breaking news. He cites editors' ideas, among them: focus on roles, not personnel; think across platforms and how you want information to flow from the newsroom; be iterative; look for non-journalistic help; practice the plan; conduct postmortems.

At its annual search event today, Google has announced real-time search results.

It's a substantial step forward in search technology, reducing significantly any delay in minutes between content creation and distribution across the engine.

The search engine has also formalized deals with Facebook and MySpace for public content streams, meaning the pipeline just widened (and perhaps got a lot less rarified).

A YouTube video demo of the new search is attached.

Google announced today its impending development of "next-generation architecture" for its world-leading search engine.

"For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google's web search. It's the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions," two Google engineers write on the development blog.

It is inviting people to test-drive the engine and provide feedback on the results. To do so requires comparing results here on the new version and there on the existing version in crawling, indexing and ranking.

The implications are significant in Google's efforts to continue to pave the way in linking content to advertising.