Search engines, RSS readers and a range of new social media developments are playing an increasingly vital role in filtering out the "noise" of the web.

But many online gatekeepers are viewed with suspicion by many media organisations, who believe they are cashing in by freely taking content which is often originated by other companies at great expense.

The news aggregators had a platform at the Association of Online Publishers conference in London yesterday.

They say they drive readers to existing media websites, those readers often being an audience that would never have considered clicking through to a new source.

But there was still a warning about Google News's move into publishing its own news content from MSN's executive producer Peter Bale.

He said: "While the agencies will consider it welcome news, publishers should be very aware of what that really means to them.

"Publishers such as the Times, the Guardian, the Sun, will see a bump down in traffic towards them from Google."

He said MSN took a different approach to its competitor, though, with its outlook not just about bringing content together, but placing tools around it.

And one of the keys to that was encouraging publishers to choose to make their content "discoverable", through networking and publishing tools such as meta data, tagging tools and existing applications.

He said: "Journalism is not free. We have to work out how to pay for it."

He told the conference that MSN's news was organised by 30 journalists and so its news story listings were based on real human-based search assessments rather than computer algorithms.

"We really value the work our partners such as ITN, Reuters and PA, We pay for their content and we respect it," he said.

"What we are trying to do on the MSN home page is to consolidate our place on Internet explorer browsers – we want to make it the destination, not the default."

Despite Google's move to publish news agency content, Josh Cohen, its business product manager said: "We don't own content but help people find it instead.

"Google focuses on news enthusiasts – we show them other perspectives on a story and so generate fresh traffic and new readers.

"Hosting stories from Associated Press is a big shift, and there's a clear line between being a distributor and being a destination."

And Angus Bankes, the founder of Moreover Technologies, took a similar line when he said: "We don't take content, we pass content on – we're driving big amounts of traffic through our relationships."

His company was also supplying and developing further products for publishers, with more "widgets" planned and more "pinging" of servers to let aggregators know when blogs are updated – with a move towards pinging for news sites not far away.

Meanwhile, Duncan Dunlop, general manager at Oodle UK expects a shift to performance-based advertising, with a merging of yellow pages, classified and the other mainstream advertising channels.

His company's technology enhances content and opens up the local advertising market.