Indexes don't work without consuming the news content first in order to build the index, right? So it's reasonable to argue that a news search index is a derived work that draws some amount of value from the source news content. Without the news sites offering their news for free to google's spider, google's index would be useless. You could make a similar argument for aggregators since they usually display excerpts and thumbnails.

Ranking seems harder to justify.

Sure, but the act only applies if you are as powerful as Google (Section 6: Application), and since they are the primary target the scope needs to be broad because Google can be counted on producing the most bad faith reading of any law to try to escape paying for the practice of scraping content from journalists in an effort to keep the traffic on their own pages.

A couple things of note:

1. Meta was the other "initial target." And so if we're in a mindset where we just dislike Google or "big powerful corporations that will stop at no end to ... whatever" then the application of the bill ALREADY hit a point where we can start to see how loosely the regulators will interpret Section 6. And according to the wording of that section, they just need to consider the "size" of the entity,"strategic advantage", and "prominent market position" in order to determine if they decide that the digital news intermediary has "a significant bargaining power imbalance."

2. With respects to what you think Google might do in order to try and "work around the law" ... I'm not a lawyer, but from what I've heard from lawyers, courts tend to be very intolerant towards people who try and apply a strict interpretation of the wording of a law in order to try and skirt around what it makes illegal. Common law, precedence and judicial interpretation really exists in large part to try and avoid that type of thing. Judges will look at things like the intent of the legislators, past court decisions and the intent of the accused in order to determine whether the accused is in violation.

In other words, Section 4 "Purpose", would be considered:

> Purpose 4 The purpose of this Act is to regulate digital news intermediaries with a view to enhancing fairness in the Canadian digital news marketplace and contributing to its sustainability, including the sustainability of news businesses in Canada, in both the non-profit and for-profits sectors, including independent local ones.

As well as Google's intent. If the court were to gather that Google's intent was to try and work around the law, they go back to the Purpose, look at Google's actions and the EFFECT of their actions and will say "Sorry, you don't get to do shit like that to try and weasel your way out of the law. It still applies." And those types of actions can often be used as evidence of an intent to break the law, so any lawyer would likely advise their client to not even consider doing slimy shit like that.

Now that you say that, I wonder if this is what SXGs[1] were about.

[1] https://web.dev/articles/signed-exchanges