One of the biggest challenges Google News faces is one that seems navel-gazingly philosophical, but is in fact completely practical: how to determine authorship. In the glut of information on the web, much of it is, if not completely duplicative, then at least derivative of a primary source. Google is trying to build a way to bake an article’s originality into its no-humans-used algorithm.

Today, it’s rolling out an experiment that hopes to tackle the “original authorship” problem: two new metatags, syndication-source and original-source, intended to attribute authorship, via URLs, into the back end of news on the web. Though the tags will work in slightly different ways, Googlers Eric Weigle and Abe Epton note in a blog post, “for both the aim is to allow publishers to take credit for their work and give credit to other journalists.”

Metatags are just one of the many tools Google uses to determine which articles most deserve news consumers’ attention. They work, essentially, by including data about articles within webpages, data that help inform Google’s search algorithms. Google itself already relies on such tagging to help its main search engine read and contextualize the web. (Remember Rupert Murdoch’s so-far-unrealized threats to opt out of Google searches? He would have done it with a noindex tag.)

The tags are simple lines of HTML:

<meta name="syndication-source" content="http://www.example.com/wire_story_1.html">

<meta name="original-source" content="http://www.example.com/scoop_article_2.html">

And they’ll work, Weigle and Epton explain, like this:

syndication-source indicates the preferred URL for a syndicated article. If two versions of an article are exactly the same, or only very slightly modified, we’re asking publishers to use syndication-source to point us to the one they would like Google News to use….

original-source indicates the URL of the first article to report on a story. We encourage publishers to use this metatag to give credit to the source that broke the story. We recognize that this can sometimes be tough to determine. But the intent of this tag is to reward hard work and journalistic enterprise.

(This latter, original-source, is similar to Google’s canonical tag — but original-source will be specific to Google News rather than all of Google’s crawlers.)

Google News is asking publishers to use the new tags under the broad logic that “credit where credit is due” will benefit everyone: users, publishers, and Google. A karma-via-code kind of thing. So, yep: Google News, in its latest attempt to work directly with news publishers, is trusting competing news organizations to credit each other. And it’s also, interestingly, relying on publishers to take a more active role in developing its own news search algorithms. In some sense, this is an experiment in crowdsourcing — with news publishers being the crowd.

At the moment, there are no ready-made tools for publishers to use these tags in their webpages — although one presumes, if they get any traction at all, there’ll be a plugin for many of the various content management systems in use at news organizations.

And the tags, for any would-be Google Gamers out there, won’t affect articles’ ranking in Google News — at least not yet. (Sorry, folks!) What it will do, however, is provide Google with some valuable data — not just about how its new tags work, but also about how willing news publishers prove to be when it comes to the still-touchy process of credit-giving. That’s a question Google News has been trying to tackle for some time. “We think it is a promising method for detecting originality among a diverse set of news articles,” the tags’ explanation page notes, “but we won’t know for sure until we’ve seen a lot of data. By releasing this tag, we’re asking publishers to participate in an experiment that we hope will improve Google News and, ultimately, online journalism.”