The New York Times reported Thursday that Google has begun running relevant text ads on Google News, a practice the search giant avoided for nearly six years.

So why is this news? Because initially, newspaper publishers were weary of Google’s news aggregator (a service that collected headlines and clips of major – and minor – newspapers, linking users to the online story’s respective site), thinking that Google was essentially building a competing news site using the newspaper’s existing content. To help ease publishers’ fears that Google was stealing money from the newspapers, big G refrained from placing ads on Google News search results.

And that just changed, owing to what Google claims, via the New York Times, was an approach that delivered contextually relevant ads. I’m guessing they also thought it would turn a profit.

Google long maintained that its use of headline and snippets were in accordance with fair use copyright laws. Do they undercut that claim once they start making money through their “fair use” of the content? Will they share a piece of the profit with the ailing newspaper industry? After all, Google depends on a thriving newspaper industry to keep Google News viable.

That all leads to the confounding and circular chicken/egg logic behind the issue. To be a success, Google News needs fresh content from newspapers that in turn need pageviews via aggregators like Google News because no one is buying the print product that ultimately feeds the beast.

The fact is that both Google and the news industry is trying to make money off of something the news industry is giving away for free. Only now, Google may have figured out a way to do it.