Google confirmed today it is to allow news publishers to limit the amount of free content that users can access through the search engine's news search.
The move comes after some media firms, most notably Rupert Murdoch's News International, accused Google of profiting from their online news.
The Web search giant said it would adapt its so-called "First Click Free" programme to prompt online readers to register or subscribe to a news provider's site after reading five free articles from that publisher in a day.
Previously, the user's first click on any article would be free for an unlimited number of articles, provided the user did not click through any more links from any article.
In a blog post, Google said the update would allow publishers to focus on potential subscribers who were accessing a lot of their content on a regular basis.
"As newspapers consider charging for access to their online content, some publishers have asked: Should we put up pay walls or keep our articles in Google News and Google Search?"
"In fact they can do both -- the two aren't mutually exclusive," said Google senior business product manager Josh Cohen.
News Corporation had been reported to be considering removing its news from Google's web search results and to be talking to rival Microsoft search engine Bing about listing stories there instead.
News International, which owns the London Timesand the Sunrecently signalled its intention to begin charging for online content from next year.
Speaking recently, the London Timeseditor James Harding said it would charge for 24-hour access to that day's edition of the newspaper alongside a subscription model which would cover others areas of its website.
News International chairman Rupert Murdoch has also threatened to remove stories from Google's search index as a way to encourage people to pay for online content.
The move comes as media group Johnston Press, which owns 12 regional titles in the Republic, began charging for access to a selection of its newspaper websites.
The payment system applies to seven titles and will restrict users of those newspapers' websites from accessing content beyond the homepage unless they pay £5 for a three-month subscription.
Johnston Press, whose titles including the Kilkenny People, the Limerick Leaderand the Tallaght Echo, last week said it had no plans to charge online readers in Ireland for access to newspapers.
Google's relationship with publishers who put news behind so-called "paywalls" is complicated by the fact its web crawlers need to access the content behind the paywall to index it and make it discoverable by its search engine.
But its crawlers cannot fill in registration or subscription forms, leading to the potential for users to be shown different content from what the crawler sees, and hence encouraging users to click through to pages that are not what they expected.
First Click Free is Google's way around that problem, known as cloaking.
Google also offers free previews of articles that publishers give it -- typically a headline and the first few paragraphs of a story -- and labels them as "subscription" in Google News.
It said on its blog post the ranking of such articles would be the same whether the articles were paid for or free.
"Paid content may not do as well as free options, but that is not a decision we make based on whether or not it's free. It's simply based on the popularity of the content with users and other sites that link to it," Google said.
Google said it would keep talking to publishers to refine its methods.