Google, the goofily named yet highly popular search engine, has gotten into the news distribution business with Google News, an editor-free compilation of approximately 4,000 news sources worldwide. And the service is putting a new spin on the concept of Internet news delivery.

Google says the new service is “compiled solely by computer algorithms without human intervention. Google employs no editors, managing editors, or executive editors.” And the fact that the process produces some unusual results is exactly what Google says it wants to achieve: “While the sources of the news vary in perspective and editorial approach, their selection for inclusion is done without regard to political viewpoint or ideology. While this may lead to some occasionally unusual and contradictory groupings, it is exactly this variety that makes Google News a valuable source of information on the important issues of the day.

At least one techie so far thinks Google News will be a hit. Leslie Walker, writing for TechNews.com calls Google News “more of a research tool that piggybacks on news services” than a news service itself.

“Oh, Google News is buggy, all right, with stories occasionally miscategorized and photographs appearing beside the wrong headlines. What would you expect from the Internet’s first artificial newscast?” she said. “My own experience watching Google’s digital newscast this week suggests it will be a hit with news junkies, considering its diversity and freshness.”

Potential problems for Google News include: how to fund the thing; the prospect of  irritating actual news originators over things like “deep linking,” and competition from other “news aggregators like Yahoo and America Online.

According to Walker, Google refined its existing web search technology to apply specifically to news and tossed the new service online to let people sample it free while worrying about how to fund it later on. Best guess is that funding the site will come from a mixture of advertising, subscription fees and syndication sales. Currently the service is offered free.

The deep linking issue may be bigger trouble. Walker reports that the process sends readers directly to articles, bypassing the originating site’s carefully constructed home pages. However “A Danish court in June held that similar instances of deep linking were illegal in a case involving a European news site,”she said.

Critical competitors are griping that the 100 percent hands free approach can’t possibly produce “a meaningful picture of what is happing in the world and people’s lives.” Walker said. But Google News responds that it hasn’t made editors obsolete. Instead, it depends on the editorial judgment of the news sites it “crawls” to understand what is important.

You can check out Google News at news.google.com.