November 6, 2009

5 Google Updates for 11/6/09: News, Maps, Books, Music and Mobile

It's the end of another eventful week in search blogging, and once again there are several Google updates just piled up waiting to be written about. So, we're saving everyone some time and just compiling them into one post. Check them out:

Google News has a new sitemaps interface. You have six months to adopt the new sitemap.

Google Books now has a magazine search page.

Via Google Search's new music search, you can now access exclusive songs hosted by MySpace and Lala for artists such as Lady Gaga and Arctic Monkeys.

Google Maps has released imagery of Berlin from 1945 to 1953.

The Google Mobile App is now available at Best Buy (still free, which is the ultimate "best buy").

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 3:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 4, 2009

Google News Offers Customization via New Sections

Alex Chitu over at Google Operating System noticed a new feature in Google News. Look to the top right corner and you'll see a link for "Add a section."

Clicking on "Add a section" takes you to a directory of news sections that you can use to customize your Google News experience.

Update: You can also create your own sections and either keep it private or make it available for public consumption. Here's how you do it: First, click the "Create your own section" button in the right sidebar (when you're on a sections page):

On the next page, choose a title for your section and then add relevant keywords. As you do, news related to those keywords will appear on the right. This will help you know if you're choosing the right keywords. Finish filling out the form. If you check the box for public view, you'll need to add a description and select a category.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 1:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 2, 2009

Google Extends Local News to France

Google is now offering Local News in its Google News service for France. This allows the French to access local news when they visit Google News instead of just the standard Google News fare. Local News has already been rolled out in the U.S., U.K., Canada, India and Germany.

To see Local News in any of these countries, look for the local section where you can enter your postal code. If you don't see the section, head to the "Personalize this page" link on the top right corner of the page.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 1:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 7, 2009

This Breaking News Just In - The Meta Keywords Tag is Still Dead!

At SMX East this week, Cris Pierry, the Senior Director of Yahoo! Search, surprised everyone by saying that Yahoo! had stopped supporting the Meta Keywords Tag several months ago.

Google has never supported the Meta Keywords Tag and Bing doesn't support it, either.

So, I think I can safely say, "The Meta Keywords Tag is still dead."

Actually, the first to notice that it had died was Andrew Goodman of Traffick, who declared way back on my September 2, 2002, "An End to Metatags (Enough Already, Part 1)". He observed, "If somebody would just declare the end of the metatag era, full stop, it would make it easier on everyone."

On October 1, 2002, Danny Sullivan, provided a second opinion in Search Engine Watch in "Death of A Meta Tag." He declared, "In my opinion, the meta keywords tag is dead, dead, dead."

Nevertheless, Inktomi and then Yahoo! Search continued to support the meta keywords tag, so some search engine optimizers continued using it, although it didn't have significant impact.

Time passed, Sullivan left Search Engine Watch to start Search Engine Land and Search Marketing Expo, and way too many search engine optimizers continued using the Meta Keywords Tag because there's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead.

But, now Pierry has officially notified the next of kin.

So, I think the entire search industry can stop using the Meta Keywords Tag -- just as Chevy Chase has stopped saying, "This breaking news just in - Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead!"

I can't wait to tell the public relations agencies and PR departments that don't want to include keywords in their headline or lead paragraph. They mistakenly think that their newswire can automatically sprinkle Meta Keywords Tags over an unedited press release like pixie dust and magically optimize it for Google News or Yahoo! News.

I've long recommended using top search keywords in headlines and at least the first 100 words of optimized press releases. However, since Yahoo! News paid even minor attention to the Meta Keywords Tag, just as Yahoo! Search did, it was hard to get some to change their behavior.

Even those who realized that top search keywords actually need to appear high up in very visible locations, had trouble dealing with the death of the Meta Keywords Tag. They would go through the five stages of grief described in the book by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, "On Death and Dying." They are: 1. Denial (This isn't happening to me!) 2. Anger (Why is this happening to me?) 3. Bargaining (I promise I'll be a better person if...) 4. Depression (I don't care anymore.) 5. Acceptance (I'm ready for whatever comes.)

But, now I can stay the meta keywords tag is dead, dead, dead.

And now, as a public service to those of our viewers who have difficulty with their hearing, I will repeat the top story of the day, aided by Senior Vice President of content for Search Engine Watch, ClickZ, and Search Engine Strategies, Mike Grehan.

Greg Jarboe: "Our top story tonight.."

Mike Grehan: [ screaming ] "Our top story tonight..!"

Greg Jarboe: "..The Meta Keywords Tag.."

Mike Grehan: [ screaming ] "..The Meta Keywords Tag..!"

Greg Jarboe: "..is still dead."

Mike Grehan: "..is still dead!"

Greg Jarboe: Good night, and have a pleasant tomorrow.

Mike Grehan: [ screaming ] Good night, and have a pleasant tomorrow!

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 4:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

October 3, 2009

Social Media Press Release Blown Away in Hail of Bullets

This week, I saw an optimized press release blown away by Google News because it was mistaken for a social media press release. It fell under a hail of bullets, an innocent victim of a formatting decision. Before I share this tragic story, let me provide some background.

Two years ago, I asked, "Is the Social Media Press Release a Meatball Sundae?" I had just finished reading Seth Godin's book, Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing out of Sync?, which defined "meatball sundae" as "the unfortunate result of mixing two good ideas." And I answered my rhetorical question by accusing the "social media press release" alias "social media news release" alias "social media release" of being a meatball sundae.

I said the meatballs were the press releases, which should be optimized for news search engines, and the sundae toppings were the "Technorati tags, Digg buttons, del.icio.us bookmarks and other Web 2.0 features," which should be added to online stories and blog posts.

And I pointed out that adding Technorati tags to your social media press releases doesn't get them into Technorati, submitting social media news releases to social news sites like Digg was social media suicide, and using a jazzy new format that features bullet points and del.icio.us links wasn't going to make bloggers care about your content.

Six months later, I took a second look at the questions I'd raised in a blog post entitled, "Does Social Media 2.0 deserve a second life?" Instead of jumping to conclusions, I said the right approach to Social Media 2.0 was to test it, test it, and test it again.

Many of the new distribution options and PR measurement tools worked. But adding social media elements to press releases didn't. Blogs and other social media enable two-way conversation, but most press releases - even many of ones that use the social media format - are essays, not interviews; broadcasts, not conversations; lectures, not discussions.

One of the things that I didn't test back then was the suggested use of bulleted text in social media press releases, versus the narrative format of traditional press releases. Although I prefered the narrative approach, I figured that it was totally fine use bullets. I mistakenly figured that format isn't content, so it probably didn't matter.

Then, this week I drafted an optimized press release about an iPhone application for a client who shall remain nameless. As a courtesy, my client sent the draft to a third-party firm that had designed and developed the iPhone app. The final approved version came back -- with bullet points listing the key features.

Since it had already taken a month to get Apple's approval to even announce the new iPhone app, I didn't make a big deal about using a list of bullets in the optimized press release. Hey, I'm open minded.

But the next morning, I was shocked, shocked to find that Yahoo! News had indexed the optimized press release, but Google News hadn't. The optimized press release had top rankings for targeted keyword phrases in Yahoo! News, but I couldn't find it -- even when I typed the entire headline into the search box and hit the Search News button.

Now, Google News can be arbitrary, whimisical and capracious when it comes to crawling press release distribution services. For example, its automated system is currently best able to crawl headlines or anchor text links that have 22 words or less.

But, I already knew that. So, I talked with the technical gurus at my press release distribution servce. Then, I went looking to see if anyone else had encountered this phenomenon before, or if it was the result of a recent change to the Google News algorithim.

That's when found a post by Rebecca Corliss on HubSpot's Inbound Internet Marketing Blog entitled, "Study Shows Social Media Releases Are Less Effective than Traditional Press Releases." In May 2009, Corliss conducted a study comparing the results of social media releases and traditional releases by publishing them across five newswires.

As you can see in the graph to the left, the traditional release format performed much better.

And one of her findings jumped off the page. She said, "Don't use formatting. Many portal sites don't accept it. (For the technical folks, we're talking about XHTML.) Ditch the bullets, the itallics and bold type. It complicates the code and makes it more difficult for your release to be syndicated. "

Corliss added, "Use social media and multimedia elements in your PR strategy, not your press releases."

So, after conferring, conversing and otherwise hobnobbing with my fellow wizards, I decided that it was time to test the narrative format in a second press release versus the bulleted text in the first.

Now, I also made some edits to the headline -- changing "launches iPhone app" to "iPhone app launched by" -- and I revised the subhead and lead paragraph. But, these were just to put a fresh look on the announcement for Yahoo! News users.

The most significant change that I made was to rewrite the bulleted text into the narrative format.

Two days later, I submitted the second press release -- selecting the same news release distribution package -- and found that both Google News and Yahoo! News had indexed it. Oh, and it had top rankings for targeted keyword phrases in both news search engines. So, press release optimization still works.

But, what's the net-net? The excessive use of bullets can kill press releases. The Associate Press doesn't use them -- even for AP News in Brief. And according to Newsknife, the Associated Press was the No. 1 source in Google News for September 2009 as well as for the year to October.

So, write your next press release the same way that AP writes its online stories. Oh, and this isn't some dyed-in-the-wool defense of traditional journalism. Check out the number of YouTube videos from The Associated Press that appear in Google News.

Back on June 28, 2009, the YouTube Biz Blog invited any professional news outlet that is already included as one of the 25,000+ sources in Google News to become an official partner on YouTube and more easily share your news videos on both YouTube and Google News.

So, I'm all for innovation -- as long as it works.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 2:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

September 16, 2009

Google Acquires reCAPTCHA; Plans to Use Technology for Books and Archives

If you've ever had to type in a bunch of funny looking letters and/or numbers when registering for a site or making a purchase online, then you've experienced CAPTCHA. Google has now acquired reCAPTCHA, a provider of the secure measure.

What sets reCAPTCHA apart from other providers is that it uses scanned archives to provide the funny looking text. reCAPTCHA then uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to convert the scan to text.

Google plans to harness the technology for its Google Books and Google News Archive Search.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 2:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

September 10, 2009

Google Plans Micropayment Platform for Publishers with Paid Content

Newspaper publishers and other media entities have made no secret about their desire to put content up behind a pay wall. The motivation behind it all is the slow death of traditional media and the loss of revenue that has come along with it.

Now, Google is planning to assist that effort by developing a micropayment platform that can help facilitate the paywall plans. It will be an extension of Google Checkout and be available for both Google and non-Google sites.

Of course, it remains to be seen if these paywall plans even work. Most newspapers had them in place when they first launched on the web. They didn't work, and the paywalls came down.

Google's smart to monetize the upcoming paywall efforts while they last. But don't be surprised if the micropayment platform ends up in the Google product graveyard if the paywall plans do indeed fail.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 11:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

September 4, 2009

Italian Regulators Expand Investigation to Google, Inc.

So much for hoping that Italian regulators would see how newspaper publishers were contradicting themselves. The probe into Google's Italian news site is now expanding to Google's main search engine.

Italian newspaper publishers are saying that Google is using their material to generate online advertising revenue on the News search site, then turning around and complaining that they're not being indexed in Google's main search.

There are so many problems with their argument. First up, the obvious problem with the complaint about Google's News search. Call me crazy, but if you're a newspaper, I would think you would want to be found on a site dedicated specifically to news.

Secondly, why is it ok to be found, via link, in Google's main search but not on Google's News search (also via link). If you purposefully opt-out of one search,

Thirdly, Google is a private company and can index however they want. Even if they were excluding newspapers who complained from the main search, too bad for those publishers. It's a business and Google can run their algorithms how they please, whether other people like it or not. Of course, it would not be very consumer friendly to leave out major newspapers from their index. So, Google would have to risk looking like they have a crappy search engine if major publishers were indeed omitted from the search results.

Last but not least, if they're going to go after Google for News Search, why not go after all engines that provide news search or sites like Techmeme that aggregate headlines? The very act of investigating Google proves how much news search is worth to the newspaper industry. Punishing Google will only make it worse for everyone involved. Let's face it, print newspapers are never going to trend back in.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 1:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

September 2, 2009

Google News Launches Four Arabic Editions

Google News is now available in Arabic for four countries: Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The editions are just like the original Google News, with computer-generated aggregate headlines.

Also like the original, they include niche headlines for Business, Sports, Entertainment, etc.

With over 40 million Arabic speaking in the world, Google says this is just the beginning of expanding their News product to the Arabic-speaking world. They plan to release additional Arabic editions of Google News in the future.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 5:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

August 31, 2009

Google News Incorporates Search Suggestion Feature

Google Suggest, a query suggestion tool, has been added to Google News. The algorithm for the feature has been tweaked to feature news-related suggestions. The feature has been added to Google News in English, French, Italian, German and Spanish.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 9:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

August 27, 2009

Italian Regulators' Investigation Against Google Essentially Proves Google Right

Italian regulators are investigating Google over complaints from newspaper publishers. The complaint is that Google bans newspapers from all of Google if a newspaper chooses to opt-out of Google News.

Google's Italian offices were searched by financial police, according to Bloomberg.

It seems that Italian newspaper publishers who are putting forth the complaint are shooting themselves in the foot (with apologies to Plaxico Burress).

On the one hand, they say it's a copyright violation to be found in Google News. On the other hand, they're complaining that they aren't found at all in Google.

So let me get this straight. A link in Google News is copyright violation. A link in Google web search results is not? I think you just proved the other side right, Italian newspaper publishers and regulators.

In this case, it's likely wise to "follow the money." Newspapers need advertising revenue to their websites, but if they're not getting as much traffic now that they've opted-out of Google News, advertising revenues have probably dropped. Instead of actually working on their business and recognizing the value of inclusion in Google News results, they simply want to make Google pay legally and likely financially as well.

Hopefully, regulators will wise up and realize the jig is up.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 2:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 29, 2009

Google Invites News Partners to Share Video

Google is inviting the more than 25,000 news sources that partner with them for Google News to share professional news videos to YouTube. They'll be able to host videos on YouTube for free once being approved as a YouTube Partner.

YouTube's news partners get featured placement on the YouTube news page and have opportunities to generate revenue via advertising, something traditional news organizations are struggling to do. But this program can generate a bigger audience for newspapers by sharing videos on a site that reaches millions.

The videos will also be visible through Google News. In May, Google News began adding YouTube videos to its results and homepage.

If you're a news organization that's interested in becoming a Google News partner, you can click here to apply. After approval, then you can apply for the YouTube partner program.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 23, 2009

Author Search Enabled on Google News

If you have a favorite journalist, you can now search their name on Google News. There are three ways you can do this:

1. Type in "author:" followed by the name.

2. Use the Advanced Search option in Google News.

3. Click the link associated with a name featured in Google News search results.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

May 15, 2009

Google News Redesigns, Adds YouTube

Google News is celebrating its 7th anniversary with an update to its homepage. There are new color frames around each section of the page. Additionally, new tiny YouTube logos are indicative of the addition of the popular online video site to the Google News search offerings.

Take a look at this screenshot:

Recently, Google News also updated its story pages with a Timeline of Articles and more universal features.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 3:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

May 11, 2009

Story Pages Get Universal in Google News

When you search Google News, links to articles have been separated into stories. Underneath each story section, is a link to more articles. That page, the Story Page, has been updated to include more universal features.

Now, Story Pages may include links to articles, quotes, blogs, photos and a timeline (which was introduced a few weeks ago).

Here's a look at a Story Page screenshot featuring a search for the latest news in the intense Carolina Hurricanes - Boston Bruins NHL playoff series:

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 5:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 21, 2009

Google Adds Like-Image Search and News Timeline to Labs

Google employees get 20% of their time to work on non-assigned projects. Sometimes when they do, the result is some pretty cool stuff that Google adds to its products.

This time, Google has announced that two 20% projects have made their way into Google Labs (aka Google's experimental playground). The two projects are "Similar Images" and "Google News Timeline."

Last week, we brought you word that Google News had introduced a "Timeline of Articles." This new timeline that's launching in Labs is different.

The Labs timeline looks like a calendar with a bunch of news stories. An on-site scrollbar helps users find more stories for a given day:

Meanwhile, Similar Images does pretty much what the name implies. Start off by searching for an image. In this case, I typed in the name of one of my favorite shows on TV, Chuck (starring Zachary Levi, don't cancel it, NBC, don't!):

In the results, I look for an image I'm interested in and click the blue link underneath that says "Similar Images"

As you can see, the results are really good!

You may remember that recently the official Google Image search recently added a color filter. It works quite good as well. It's nice to see these advances in image search from the Google team.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 12:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

April 15, 2009

Google News Contributes to Real-Time News Trend with "Timeline of Articles"

Google News has rolled out a "Timeline of articles" so that users can keep track of events as they occur or occurred. Simply click on the link to all articles beneath a cluster of news stories about a news event. You'll see a graph on the right hand side.

I can't help but think of how there seems to be this race to compete in real-time news. Twitter has changed news because you can get real-life witness (and non-journalist) accounts about an event as it happens.

For example, earthquakes are often Tweeted, and recently Google added recent earthquake results to its main search site.

I expect to see more features along this line in Google News and other online news sites as time goes by.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

April 1, 2009

Google News Expands Local Feature to UK, Canada, and India

In February 2008, Google News launched a feature that allowed users to view local news. The feature is a section of the Google News homepage. Users simply type in their zip code or city and get headlines from their area. The feature, like most Google products and updates, debuted to a US-only audience.

Now, users in the UK, Canada, and India are getting the local news feature for their respective Google News sites.

If you can't find the local section on your page, click the "Personalize this page" link in the top right corner. Select "Add local section" and you should be good to go.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 6:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 28, 2009

Death of newspapers or new era of online journalism?

I just received an email from an old friend about The Christian Science Monitor, which published its final daily print edition yesterday. This prompts me to ask, "Should search engine marketers mourn the death of newspapers or celebrate the new era of online journalism?"

Before I tackle this emotional question, let's review the facts objectively -- as any good journalist would do.

The key words in my first sentence are "daily print." Or, as John Yemma, the editor of The Christian Science Monitor, wrote yesterday, "As of today, we are shedding print on a daily basis."

In his Editor's message about changes at the Monitor, Yemma acknowledged, "To survive in today's business environment, newspapers everywhere are taking radical steps. Some are decreasing the frequency of print. Some are now Web-only. Some have shut down or surrendered to receivership."

For example, the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News announced in December 2008 that both would cut back home delivery to only Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays starting in spring 2009. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has just gone to a web-only version. And the Rocky Mountain News and Ann Arbor News have shut down completely.

Meanwhile, the Project for Excellence in Journalism has just issued The State of the News Media 2009. As the inverted pyramid style of news requires, the introduction of the annual report on American journalism captures the "gist" of the story: "Some of the numbers are chilling."

It continues, "Newspaper ad revenues have fallen 23% in the last two years. Some papers are in bankruptcy, and others have lost three-quarters of their value. By our calculations, nearly one out of every five journalists working for newspapers in 2001 is now gone, and 2009 may be the worst year yet."

So, when Yemma said in his Editor's message, "Saying goodbye to daily print closes an era," he was talking about more than the Monitor. He was also addressing the looming death of the newspaper industry.

However, Yemma then turns to this new thought: "But the Monitor itself - the century-old journalistic enterprise chronicling the world's challenges and progress - is becoming more daily than ever."

Yemma added, "No longer inked on wood pulp, no longer trucked from printing plants to your mailbox, no longer published only five days a week, the daily Monitor is now a dynamic online newspaper on all days."

And he concluded, "Two million individuals now engage with us online each month, about 40 times the number that have been subscribing to the print daily. We are linked deeply and extensively across the Internet."

Before joining the Monitor in July 2008, Yemma oversaw editorial operations of the Boston Globe's Boston.com website and led the efforts to transform the newsroom from print to multi-media. So, he has the chops to make that statement.

Or, as Yemma put it, "Think of it this way: We are putting on new clothes for a new era, but we are the same Monitor, committed to the same objective we have adhered to since we were launched a century ago."

And according to Newsknife, The Christian Science Monitor was one of the top six sources in Google News in February 2009, and #1 in terms of most appearances on the home page as a percentage of site total.

So, maybe there is something for search engine marketers to celebrate here.

To paraphrase Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and cofounder of The Well, The Christian Science Monitor is now just bits flying around rather than atoms, but it remains a steady and reliable source of information about the world.

I'll link to that.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 6:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

NYC Public Relations Firms: Give PR Jobs to CCNY Students

If top NYC public relations firms are smart, they'll give PR jobs or paid internships to The City College of New York (CCNY) students that I met last week. Why? Because most of these kids know something that most of us don't and it is crucial to our survival as an industry.

Let me explain.

I played reverse hooky last Wednesday afternoon. I attended school when I didn't have to.

Professor Philip Ryan invited me to visit his Introduction to Public Relations class at CCNY. He was covering Chapter 13 of Public Relations Strategies and Tactics, (9th Edition) by Dennis L. Wilcox of San Jose State University and Glen T. Cameron of University of Missouri. Published by Allyn & Bacon in February 2008, Chapter 13 is entitled, "New Technologies in Public Relations."

But, as one of the students in Professor Ryan's class pointed out, "There's nothing in our textbook about SEO PR."

So, I asked for a show of hands. "How many of you use Facebook?" Virturally everyone did. "How many of you use YouTube?" Nearly everyone did. "How many of you use Twitter?" Almost everyone did.

So, I observed, "Well, SEO-PR was founded 2003, Facebook in 2004, YouTube in 2005, and Twitter in 2006. So, just because these new technologies aren't covered in your textbook doesn't mean they aren't fundamentally changing public relations as we know it. I'm speaking at Search Engine Strategies New York this week and these new technologies are all on the agenda along with social media and blogging."

Another student observed, "When I Googled the term 'SEO' you weren't ranked #1."

I replied, "Well, that's not one of my target terms. Now, if you Google the term 'SEO PR', you'll see my firm is ranked #1."

The student countered, "But that's the name of your company."

And I responded, "The term 'SEO PR' gets about 320 searches a month. Not bad for a keyword that didn't exist in 2003. But, if you Google 'blog outreach', you'll also see my firm is currently ranked #1. How many of you think blog outreach is an important part of media relations services, especially with 900,000 blog posts every day?"

Then, I added, "Besides, what I really want you to do is conduct a query at Google News for the term 'Online Marketing Summit' and find the optimized press release that we distributed yesterday for ClickZ."

I think that's when they started cutting me a little slack.

Then, Professor Ryan asked, "How is contextual marketing changing public relations as we know it?"

I explained, "Contextual advertising is targeted to a Web page based on the page's content. This means there is the opportunity to create editorial content targeted at the contextual advertising that you want to attract to your news blog or YouTube channel."

Yes, these were tough questions from sophisticated students and their professor.

Which means these CCNY students are exactly the kind of people that NYC public relations firms need to hire if they are going to survive short-term or thrive long-term.

Yes, they are still acquiring the skill of writing a press release. But they already understand that an optimized press release can get a high ranking in news search engines.

Yes, they are still becoming acquainted with the fundamentals of persuasion and communications theory. But they have already mastered how to make friends on Facebook.

Yes, they are still beginning to recognize how PR relates to other fields of marketing. But they're already familiar with how to upload YouTube videos.

Yes, they are still learning the key ethical issues affecting the practice of PR. But they've developed an appreciation for the acceptable use ofand unacceptable abuse of Twitter.

Unfortunately, most NYC public relations firms won't give PR jobs or even paid internships to these CCNY students?

Why? Short term, the recession is the primary excuse. But even if there is an opening, most of the job descriptions in the public relations industry were written back in the 20th Century. So, these square pegs won't fit into the round holes.

For example, is your HR department trying to hire an entry level public relations specialist? Does the job description read: "Prepares and disseminates information regarding an organization through newspapers, periodicals, television and radio and other forms of media. May require a bachelor's degree in a related area and 0-2 years of experience in the field or in a related area. Has knowledge of commonly-used concepts, practices, and procedures within a particular field. Relies on instructions and pre-established guidelines to perform the functions of the job. Primary job functions do not typically require exercising independent judgment. Works under immediate supervision; typically reports to a supervisor or manager."

So, don't blame your HR department if they aren't looking for someone who can prepare and optimize information regarding an organization through news search engines, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

And who is at fault if someone who doesn't have a bachelor's degree gets filtered out during the screening process even through they could have brought knowledge of new concepts, practices and procedures to the table?

And ask yourself, honestly, do you want someone who relies on instructions and pre-established guidelines to perform the ever-changing fuctions of the job? Or do you really need someone who doesn't typically exercise independent judgment in an emerging field that didn't exist when you went to college?

In other words, are you giving PR jobs to the people you will need in 2009 and the decade after this? Or, is your HR department rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic?

Now, if I were you, I'd find a way to play reverse hooky at CCNY.

Other "guests" to Professor Ryan's class have included Garrett Glaser, a corporate communications consultant and former reporter for CNBC, and Rena L. Lewis, the Director of Brand Management, Industries & Marketing, at KPMG, and will include David Grant, President of LVM Group.

And television journalism icon Dan Rather will deliver the Spring 2009 Samuel Rudin Distinguished Visiting Scholars Lecture at The City College of New York on Thursday, April 2. Mr. Rather, who was anchor and managing editor of the CBS Evening News from 1981 to 2005, will speak about "Democracy and the 24-Hour News Cycle."

This kind of "higher education" doesn't fit on the normal resume.

That's why it's time to overhaul the job screening process at most NYC public relations firms to ensure that you're giving PR jobs to CCNY students and others like them who are crucial to the survival of the public relations industry.

But, hey, what do I know? I'm not even mentioned in the college textbooks.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

March 17, 2009

Google Adds Partners and Ads to Hosted News

Google has made a couple of announcements regarding Hosted News. First up, 8 news agencies have been added as Hosted News partners. All of the agencies belong to the European Press Agency. The agreement will allow the agencies to distribute newswire content on Google News.

Seconly, ads will now appear next to Hosted News stories. The ads will appear below the main text of the articles. You'll need to click on a single story page in order to see these particular ads. Last month, ads were added to Google News results.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 4:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 10, 2009

Google AdSense Releases News Widget

Google AdSense recently released a new widget that allows sites to place news on their site. It looks like your basic AdSense box, but with "powered by Google News" in the tab at the bottom instead. Take a look:

Users can select the type of news they wish to appear on the widget for their site. Also customizable are size of the frame, the topics, and the number of articles.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 7:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 27, 2009

The fourth estate is dead; long live the fourth estate

Back in May 2005, Linda Rutherford sent me an email with the subject line: "Demise of the fourth estate." Linda is now the Vice President of Communications and Strategic Outreach at Southwest Airlines, but she is a former a reporter for the Dallas Times Herald newspaper.

In her email, Linda wrote, "If you have a few moments, please take a look at this short video. It's an interesting short movie from the Museum of Media History predicting the demise of the fourth estate.

"The scenario is entertaining, a bit frightening and not too far-fetched.

"It hints at the monumental changes afoot in how consumers will learn about news and form opinions about brands.

"Thought given your role you would enjoy this creative prediction of what's to come."

Linda was right. The 8-minute video by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson is a bit frightening. And the scenario it depicted was not too far fetched: "In the year 2014, The New York Times has gone offline. The Fourth Estate's fortunes have waned. What happened to the news?"

The same day that Linda sent her email, The New York Times Company announced a "targeted staff reduction program that will include approximately 190 employees at The New York Times and the New England Media Group, which includes The Boston Globe."

While the staff reduction represented less than 2% of the New York Times Company's total workforce back in 2005, the cuts didn't end there.

In its report on The State of the News Media 2006, the Project for Excellence in Journalism, asked, "Will we recall this as the year when journalism in print began to die?"

In December 2007, I wrote an article for Search Engine Watch entitled, "Blogs are the new trade press." I observed, "In many industries, the trade press has imploded." In our industry, I reported that online publications and group blogs generated close to 88 percent of the coverage of SES Chicago and PubCon. (The remaining 11 percent was - you guessed it - press releases.)

A year later, I reported on the battery of online video crews interviewing speakers between sessions at SES Chicago 2008. I also interviewed Abby Johnson of WebProNews about this trend. Abby is a pioneer in the field and has been producing videos for the WebProNews Video Blog for years.

Abby Johnson, WebProNews, discusses the top trends at SES Chicago

We're now halfway between 2004, the year that Museum of Media History made its predection, and 2014, the date when it predicted the demise of the fourth estate. So, I think it's time to declare: The fourth estate is dead; long live the fourth estate!"

Yes, print journalism continues to implode. The Rocky Mountain News, Colorado's oldest newspaper, is publishing its last edition today. The Chicago Tribune and LA Times have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The Christian Science Monitor is going "all digital." US News & World Report is now published every other week. PC Magazine is going "all digital."

Even in my home town, The Boston Globe is cutting 50 jobs in its newsroom, fifth newsroom staff reduction since 2001. At its peak in 2000, the Globe newsroom had 552 full-time jobs. When the latest cuts are complete, there will be about 300 full-time newsroom and editorial employees, plus another 29 news employees at Boston.com.

At the same time that print media are imploding, blogs are exploding into a global phenomenon that has hit the mainstream. According to eMarketer, there were 22.6 million US bloggers in 2007 (12 percent of Internet users) and 94.1 million US blog readers (50 percent).

And comScore Video Metrix reports that Nearly 150 million U.S. Internet users watched an average of 96 videos per viewer in December 2008, or a record 14.3 billion online videos during the month. This means 78.5 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video in December. The duration of the average online video was 3.2 minutes. So, the average online video viewer watched 309 minutes of video, or more than 5 hours.

Now, this doesn't mean that all of the predictions in the Museum of Media History video turned out to be right. For example, it predicted that Google would acquire TiVo. It didn't. Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion instead.

Still, I predict that you'll be able to see the new fourth estate for yourself at SES New York 2009. There will be lots of bloggers and a bunch of videographers. And, who knows, we might even see a print reporter or two -- attending sessions like "Publishers & Agencies: New Business Models for Changing Times", "Video Search Engine Optimization: 2009 and Beyond" and "News Search SEO."

I'll be at all three of these sessions, so I'll let you know if my prediction comes true.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 7:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 26, 2009

Google News Gets Ads in Search Results

Search advertising has come to Google News. Type in a query and you'll see sponsored links running along the right side just like you do in "regular" Google.

Here's a search for coffee on Google News:

Google began testing ads on a variety of its web properties last November. The testing of ads then in Google News was for "search refinements." In other words, if you searched for a term on the main Google site and then clicked "News," that's a search refinement.

Google also rolled out sponsored videos to YouTube last November.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 8:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

February 12, 2009

Google News Offers 8 Tips on How to Make Your Site Crawlable

Online news publishers will want to take note of eight tips that Google News is offering to help them better index your site. Here they are:

Keep the article body clean - keeping the content close to the title in the html and not breaking it up with a bunch of tags and other code will make it more likely that the correct content gets indexed
Make sure article URLs are permanent and unique
Take advantage of stock tickers in Sitemaps
Check your encoding - make sure it's consistent and uniform
Make your article publication dates explicit
Keep original content separate from press releases
Format your images properly - use large images (JPEGs are crawled better) with "reasonable" aspect rations as well as descriptive captions.
Article Titles in Google News - be sure to have the title in both the title tag and as the headline of the page

What do you think of these tips? Let us know in the comments.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 12:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

August 21, 2008

Google News Enables Cross-Language Search

Lately, Google has had a global focus. Recently, they gave tips on developing a multi-lingual site. Now, they're enabling cross-language search in Google News.

Users most likely to notice the change reside in countries where there are few online news resources or where multiple languages are traditionally spoken. Despite the heavy influx of people from Spanish-speaking countries, Google says US users will primarily see English. So will users from the UK. However, if you sort your results by date, you may see sources from a foreign language.

If you type your query in another language, then your results will be from that language no matter where you're typing from.

In June, Google announced that it was testing new features in Google News, as "part of the evolving state of online journalism."

What do you think of enabling cross-language search in Google News?

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 20, 2008

Google News Testing Updates

Google News has announced that they will be testing updates in the coming weeks. Only a few users will see the "experiments," which will be based on research and feedback. Expect any changes to be related to the design of the site and the "evolving state of online journalism."

Back in 2006, Google explained its testing process. "To learn more, we sometimes randomly select a group of people to see a possible improvement to search options. Or we may select a group of people and try out a new element while they're searching. If you ever wonder why your Google site looks slightly different from that of the person sitting next to you, this is why."

If you see any changes to Google News, let us know in the comments!

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 11:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 14, 2008

Google News Clusters: Keep 'Em Un-Separated

The Google news team has improved the "clusters" in their search results. Clusters are similar news stories that are grouped together. Previously, clusters were formed for 3 days, and then the individual news stories were kicked out the house to make it on their own.

Now, those clusters will exist for the full 30 day indexing of the news stories.

Writing on the Google News Blog, Lucian Cionca commented on how this change affects the big picture for Google News: "I think this brings us a step closer to our goal of making news universally accessible from as many sources, perspectives and languages as the world can offer."

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 6, 2008

Google Finally Copies Microsoft, Adds 'Related Searches' to Google News

In Microsoft's big pursuit of Google, they often seem to update their search products to include features Google has already mastered. This time, the tables are turned and Google is following in Microsoft's footsteps.

Google News has announced the addition of 'Related Searches' to its news feature. When Live Search launched recently, 'Related Search' was a built-in feature.

And in more shocking news - Live Search does it better, in my humble opinion. Related searches are placed on a right sidebar above the fold, ready to be of assistance. Google places its related searches after the last result on a page.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 9:46 AM | Permalink

April 3, 2008

Google News Truths and Myths

Like a celebrity sitting down with Barbara Walters, Google News has decided to clear up rumors surrounding how articles are included and ranked. In a post on the official Google News blog, software engineer Andy Golding addressed some assumptions floating around about how articles are indexed.

Here are the Myths:

* Having an image next to your article improves your ranking * Timing the publication of your article improves your article ranking * There's no way to see why my articles weren't included in Google News * Publishing a sitemap helps my rankings * If I put AdSense on my site, my article rankings will improve

And now the Truths:

* Redesigning my site may affect my coverage in Google News * Articles that are just images or video won't be included * Updating an article after posting it will create problems with Google News

Things to keep in mind:

* Google News only visits each URL once. If you make updates, it won't be reflected in Google News results. This could change in the future, however. * If you try to game the system with duplicate content or constantly rewriting stories, you might get flagged in the system as spam. * Use Webmaster Tools to help analyze your coverage * A sitemap helps Google News find your content, but not rank it

Other Google News, um, News you might be interested in:

Google News Unveils Two Updates to Comments Feature Newsknife finds dramatic changes in Google News ratings What Do Users Get on Google News Local Search? Zip.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 9:59 AM | Permalink

March 26, 2008

Maybe Google's Not Becoming a Portal?

Last week at SES NY, new comScore data on universal search showed that Google was sending more traffic to its own properties than it had been in the past. That led some people (including me) to wonder if that meant Google was becoming more like a portal than a search engine.

But that data appears to miss the larger picture, where Google is sending even more traffic to news sites than it does to Google News. In today's SearchDay, "Is Google Not So Portal-Like After All?," Greg Jarboe digs into the subject, and finds some surprising results.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 1:05 PM | Permalink

March 24, 2008

Google News Unveils Two Updates to Comments Feature

Google has just made SEO-PR (that's Public Relations, not PageRank) harder and easier at the same time! Two updates have been made to the Comments feature in Google News. Comments allows people in the news to, well, comment on stories about them or their company.

Comments have to be verified by Google, which is good since we can only imagine how this service could be abused. To make that process easier, there is now a contact form in case you find yourself in the midst of your 15 minutes of fame.

Also, there is now a link to all Google Comments in the main Google News page. Once on the page featuring all of the comments, you can search the comments as long as you put your keyword with "source:google_news." You can subscribe to an RSS feed of those specific results or create a Google Alert for them.

An SEO's job is never done, and these updates to Google News Comments has made sure of it! Universal search made online reputation management an ever more important task. At least with these updates, Google News offers users an outlet for telling the flip side of the story.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 12:24 PM | Permalink

February 7, 2008

What Do Users Get on Google News Local Search? Zip.

Google News now slices and dices local news by zip code.

Before passing judgment on the new Google News feature -- launched on the Google News blog under "All News Is Local" - Google asks users to provide feedback. As usual, Google calls the launch an experiment.

The results? As you can see from a news search for "90210" the SERP (search engine results page) the Google News search algorithm ranks the zip code high. The deceased "90210" TV show ranks first. The keyword 90210 is in the title tag. Plus,

The Google News experiment may present a challenge for search engine optimization professionals who specialize in SEO PR. It's more likely, though, that Marketwire's new Social Media 2.0 press release product will have more of an impact on the way corporations - including newspapers - disseminate news and information.

At this early stage, geotargeting news by typing in a city name Typing in "Beverly Hills" in Google News doesn't deliver better results, favor local news sources, or aggregate local news.

This Google experiment? Google Local News search may not be canceled like the 90210 TV series but it's not ready for primetime.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 9:16 AM | Permalink

December 12, 2007

Newsknife ranks top news sites in Google News for 2007

Newsknife has just produced a ranking of the Top News Sites of 2007, based on its study of the listings of over 3,800 news sites in Google News through the past year.

The Top News Sites of 2007 compiled by Newsknife's analysis of listings by news sites at Google News during 2007 are: 1 New York Times 2 Voice of America 3 Reuters 4 Washington Post 5 ABC News 6 Houston Chronicle 7 Forbes 8 Times Online, UK 9 Bloomberg 10 CNN 11 Los Angeles Times 12 Associated Press

Newsknife's ratings are based on monitoring the main US-oriented Google News site. Its Top 12 for 2007 suggests a trend towards US-based news sites, compared with previous years.

As I reported earlier this year in a post entitled, "Was Google's AP announcement a PR disaster?", the big event was the late-August debut of several major wire services at Google News. Calculated on an annual basis, Associated Press made Newsknife's Top 12 this year and Newsknife expects to see it climb in 2008.

In the Newsknife rankings posted today, there is a section entitled, "Associated Press winning the numbers game." Newsknife takes a closer look at November 2007 rankings and observes, "It looks like Associated Press could be taking up the position of greatest volume supplier of news items to Google News."

Of course, one month of data does not a trend make. Still, it reinforces a recommendation that I made back in September: "Pitch your next big story directly to one of the 3,000 AP journalists in one of the more than more than 240 AP bureaus worldwide. If they write a story, it has a better chance of appearing in Google News than any of the “duplicate articles” that might appear in one of the thousands of daily newspaper, radio, television and online customers that AP serves."

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 4:20 PM | Permalink

November 6, 2007

Times Online editor claims Google is 'hugely dangerous'

According to a story by Oliver Luft in Journalism.co.uk, the editor of Times Online today told the Society of Editors conference in the UK that Google was "hugely dangerous" to the newspaper industry. Responding to a question from the floor during a Q&A session, Anne Spackman told delegates, "We absolutely can't afford not to be brilliant on Google News. I think Google is hugely dangerous." If you parse through her double negative, I think she said that Times Online needs to be brilliant on Google News. And, as we all know, brilliant means "wicked smart."

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 2:31 PM | Permalink

October 17, 2007

YouTube video appears in Google News

A YouTube video from AlJazeeraEnglish appeared on the home page of Google News today. It features an interview with Kurdish separatist leader Murat Karayilan. See below.

Back on May 23, 2007, IDG News Service asked Nathan Stoll, the product manager of Google News if he had any plans to add a video component to Google News. Stoll said then, "We don't want to preannounce any features, but our Google News philosophy is to give users access to all the perspectives on a news story. To the extent that a lot of those are in video and becoming available online, we'd certainly love to make those perspectives available and easily discoverable." Well, those perspectives are now available and easily discoverable.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 10:38 AM | Permalink

September 11, 2007

Newsknife finds dramatic changes in Google News ratings

On August 31, 2007, Google announced that it would start hosting material produced by The Associated Press (AP) and three other wire services on Google News. "After just 9 days, it looks like this is already having a big effect on the relevance rankings of news sites there," Newsknife has just reported.

Newsknife, which is based in New Zealand, compared its pre-wire-service rankings for all of August with its wire-services-included rankings for the first nine days of September. While the September sample is small -- only 9,010 listings by 1,092 sites for 72 news stories -- Newsknife finds the changes are dramatic.

In August, the top news sites at Google News were: 1 Forbes 2 New York Times 3 ABC News 4 Reuters 5 Washington Post 6 Guardian Unlimited, UK

Looking at September 1-9, the top news sties at Google News were: 1 Guardian Unlimited, UK 2 New York Times 3 Washington Post 4 The Associated Press 5 BBC News, UK 6 Voice of America

So, within nine days, AP has jumped into the top 6 ratings. And Agence France-Presse, another one of the wire services now hosted on Google News, wasn't far behind.

According to Newsknife, "Such a strong showing by the wire services suggests this is the new reality. Some others sites will presumably move down the Google News rankings to make way."

On August 31, Josh Cohen, the business product manager for Google News, said, "This change will provide more room on Google News for publishers' most highly valued content: original content." And it appears that Google News is rewarding original content.

As evidence, Newsknife pointed to "the other remarkable feature of our September-to-date ratings: the rise of non-wire-service site Guardian Unlimited."

According to Newsknife, "Surely, we can infer here that Google News is rewarding originality. In Newsknife's opinion this is a long-awaited reward."

Newsknife's "Wire Services Watch" will continue tracking the ratings rise and fall for individual news sites over the next few months -- including the wire services. I plan to follow up when it becomes clear who the winners and losers are.

Nevertheless, the early returns indicate that the advice I provided in my SEW blog post on September 3 was on target, "Pitch your next big story directly to one of the 3,000 AP journalists in one of the more than more than 240 AP bureaus worldwide. If they write a story, it has a better chance of appearing in Google News than any of the 'duplicate articles' that might appear in one of the thousands of daily newspaper, radio, television and online customers that AP serves."

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 5:50 PM | Permalink

September 3, 2007

Was Google's AP announcement a PR disaster?

On the Friday before the long Labor Day weekend, Google announced that it would start hosting material produced by The Associated Press (AP), The Canadian Press (CP), The Press Association (PA) in the UK, and Agence France-Presse (AFP) on Google News.

Josh Cohen, the business product manager for Google News, made the announcement by posting an item at 10:48 a.m. on the Google News Blog entitled, “Original stories, from the source.” At 3:45 p.m., Cohen told AP, “This may result in certain publishers losing traffic for their news wire stories, but it will allow more room for their original content.”

Is it conceivable that the folks at Google didn't realize that their deal with AP was going to generate a lot of controversy?

Someone, somewhere in the Googleplex should have known that AP is owned by 1,500 daily newspaper members in the US and its news is currently used by 1,700 daily, weekly, non-English and college newspapers as well as 5,000 radio and television outlets. Removing all their “duplicate articles” from Google News results wasn't likely to be welcomed as “good news” by thousands of AP's customers.

And you'd think that at least one Googler would have Googled “AP” and found the Wikipedia listing for Associated Press, which includes the following sentence, “The explosion of media and news outlets with the arrival of the Internet has posed a threat to AP's financial structure.”

Well, at least Cohen didn't say, “We had to destroy the daily newspaper order to save it.”

Now, I've been in public relations for more than 25 years. And up until five years ago, if I had to announce something controversial, I couldn't have picked a better day to do it than the Friday before a long Labor Day weekend.

Most of the content for the big Sunday newspapers would have already been put to bed on Thursday. And at least some of the senior journalists who might have normally grilled me had taken Friday off, so they could beat the rush to the beach, lake or mountains.

Even if some of the reporters left behind covered the news, their stories would have been missing more than a couple of caustic comments from a few industry analysts, who were off helping their kids move into college dorms. Plus, these controversial stories would have appeared in print on a Saturday morning at the beginning of a three-day holiday when fewer readers than normal were around to see them.

But that was then. And this is now.

Everything in the PR playbook changed five years ago this month when Google launched Google News. And over this year's long Labor Day weekend, I was able to use Google News to find more than 275 articles about Google's AP announcement. This included:

• “Google News Becomes A Publisher” by Thomas Claburn of InformationWeek, who wrote on Friday, August 31, 2007, “If most people end up reading the source material on Google News, publishers who buy widely syndicated content may find that Associated Press articles, for example, are bringing in less traffic.”

• “Google (GOOG): All the news that fits” by Douglas A. McIntyre of Blogging Stocks, wrote on Saturday, September 1, 2007, “News providers to Google now have to worry about whether Google will end up highlighting a small number of news providers who will license to Google all of their content.”

• “Google becomes a newspaper” by Nick Farrell of the Inquirer in the UK, who wrote earlier today, “Search engine outfit Google has decided that it is better to become a newspaper than it is to be sued for nicking all of its content.”

Something else has radically changed the PR playbook over the past few years: The blog. According to Technorati, there were 100,000 blogs in March 2003. By the end of July 2007, there were some 93.8 million blogs worldwide.

And unlike most journalists, most bloggers tend to do more writing over the weekend than they can squeeze into weekdays, when they have to spend at least eight hours doing their day job.

For example, over this long Labor Day weekend, I used Google Blog Search – which was launched two years ago this month – to find more than 12,996 posts about Google's AP announcement – from just the past few days. This included:

• “Google Now Officially Competing with Newspapers; So is AP” by Dan Gillmor, who wrote on Saturday, September 1, 2007, in the Center for Citizen Media Blog, “The deal is another proof that Google's insistence of non-competition with news organizations is utter garbage, and has been for some time.”

• “Google deal uncovers truth that AP is now a competitor to newspapers, and papers are suckers for being members of it” by Steve Boriss, who wrote on Sunday, September 2, 2007, in The Future of News, “The question AP member papers should now be asking is not how Google could be so mean, but how they, themselves could be so blind about their relationship with the AP.”

• “Google is the Clown Suit Rental Store” by the head lemur, who wrote earlier today in Raving Lunacy, “Reporting and reporters on the local levels have been eviscerated by the quick fix of the wire service, which is an editorial and corporate decision to reduce those pesky human resource costs, like reporters….”

So, who was around this weekend to respond to all these criticisms?

Earlier this afternoon, I emailed a couple of my PR contacts at Google, but I hadn't received a reply by the time I posted this item. I guess they were off for the holiday.

So, what are the lessons that PR professionals can learn from Google's AP announcement? There are two.

First, pitch your next big story directly to one of the 3,000 AP journalists in one of the more than more than 240 AP bureaus worldwide. If they write a story, it has a better chance of appearing in Google News than any of the “duplicate articles” that might appear in one of the thousands of daily newspaper, radio, television and online customers that AP serves.

You may have sympathy for those pesky newspaper reporters, but you job is to get publicity for your corporate clients and their commercial products. And Google News has just announced -- as the Onion once did -- that this "scrappy band of lovable misfits is no match for rich kids."

Second, don't plan to spend time with family and friends over the three-day weekend if you announce something controversial on the Friday before Labor Day. Google News and Google Blog Search have rewritten the PR playbook. A surprising number of different sources are cranking out original stories – with different perspectives – even you deserve to take some time off.

My advice is to announce controversial news early on the Tuesday morning after Labor Day, when you at least have a shot at managing the response from 9 to 5. Hey, the last thing you want to do is come to work tomorrow morning to discover that hundreds of news articles and thousands of blog posts have grilled your organization while you were attending a cookout.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 9:55 PM | Permalink

August 9, 2007

Google Ranking Comments By Subjects of News Stories

This is new and news. Google is allowing the subjects of news articles to have their comments ranked in with the news items they are being written about. I noticed this today and have seen a number of stories on it - though no Google comments appended.

The Associated Press has a detailed story.

Posted by Frank Watson at 3:42 PM | Permalink

July 9, 2007

Newsknife names top sources in Google News for environmental articles

While the impact of humans on the environment has been one of the big stories so far for 2007, that doesn't seem reflected in the environmental articles that appear in Google News. According to Newsknife, only 37 of the 1048 news items recorded at Google News to the end of June 2007 have been clearly related to the environment. Even then, Newsknife had to include news of local items like storms along with important issues like global warming.

The top news sources for environmental articles in Google News include:

1 The Boston Globe 3 appearances found L2, 1, 3:00 pm Wed Jan 31, Welch: Interference in science "stunning" L1, 1, 6:58 pm Fri Mar 16, Montpelier escapes flooding... L3, 1, 7:00 pm Thu Mar 22, Gore takes his global-warming battle to Congress

2 AllAfrica.com 2 W1, 1, 7:00 pm Mon Jan 29, Nigeria: The Weather is Confused T1, 1, 7:00 pm Fri Feb 2, Africa: Scientists United On Human-Induced Climate Change

3 The Christian Science Monitor 2 W1, 1, 7:00 pm Sun Feb 4, ...calls mount for global response W2, 1, 6:59 pm Tue Mar 13, Britain's 'global first' bill to cut CO2 emissions

4 The Houston Chronicle 2 L1, 1, 7:00 pm Sun Mar 4, Bush tours towns hit by tornadoes L2, 1, 7:01 pm Wed Apr 25, EPA accused of flouting Supreme Court

5 The New York Times 2 W3, 1, 7:00 pm Mon Jan 15, At Summit, Asian Nations Sign Energy Accord L3, 1, 11:26 pm Tue May 22, California Wants Strict Auto Emission Rules

To see the entire list, go to Newsknife's “Ultimate 2007 environment news resource,” which lists the headlines that Newsknife found at Google News as the first listed source for 37 environment-related news items, January - June 2007.

Or, if you are a Newsknife member (which costs only $10), you can get a list of more than 5,000 environment-related headlines from 985 news sites worldwide that wrote about these 37 stories, but were buried as many as 10 pages deep in the news search listings.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 2:47 PM | Permalink

May 10, 2007

Google Cleans Up Google News

Some recent housecleaning at Google News has resulted in the removal of some controversial foreign news sources that appeared to be gaming the Google News algorithm to drive traffic to their AdSense-heavy site.

One Romanian site, Playfuls.com, had been highly prominent in Google News search results, to the point where as many as ten stories from the publication made the front page, as illustrated by WebProNews in March.

As pointed out by news aggregator Texyt, Playfuls has been recently been removed from the Google News index.

A Google spokesperson confirmed the move, saying "To ensure a high quality service for our end users, we periodically review our index of news sources, particularly following user complaints, and have recently removed some sources that do not meet our criteria as news organizations, including Playfuls.com."

The spokesperson declined to discuss Playfuls' situation specifically, but offered the guiding principles it uses when considering a site for inclusion, and thus for removal:

The source offers information that is updated regularly
It is managed by an organization (not an individual) and includes organizational information on its site
The source does not include hate speech or pornography
The source does not allow open posting of content without editorial review
The source's website is technically conducive to inclusion

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:33 PM | Permalink

May 3, 2007

Google (but not Google News) indexes Belgian newspapers again

Aoife White, an AP Business Writer, reports that Belgian French-language newspapers are back in Google. In a joint statement, Google and the newspapers' copyright group Copiepresse said they had decided that Google could once again list the newspapers on the search engine.

But they are still in talks about Google News, one of the main parts of their dispute. "The Belgian French and German-language daily press publishers and Google Inc. intend to use a quiet period in the court dispute to continue their efforts to identify tangible ways to collaborate in the long term," they said.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 12:38 PM | Permalink

April 30, 2007

Google News adds button to Google Finance

If you search for a publicly traded company on Google News, you'll find a small button on the lower right of each cluster of results to Google Finance. Last fall, a new link in Google News started significantly increased traffic to Google Blog Search. It appears that this new button is designed to boost traffic to Google Finance, which lags Yahoo Finance by a wide margin according to Hitwise.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 12:33 PM | Permalink

April 19, 2007

MySpace to take on Google News and Digg

The Times Online and AP report that MySpace is going into the news search business with a new service that will scour the internet for stories and let users vote on which ones receive the most exposure. This approach combines elements of Google News and Digg. It also indicates that the social networking site has ambitions to become a portal like Yahoo.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 8:08 AM | Permalink

April 6, 2007

Google Settles Copyright Suit Over Google News

Google has settled a copyright suit filed by French news agency Agence France-Presse over Google News' use of its content, according to a AP report. The suit, first filed two years ago, accused Google of posting news summaries, headlines and photos without permission.

Google has apparently paid an undisclosed sum to license AFP's articles. According to Eric Scherer, AFP's director for strategic planning and partnerships, "With the other major Internet players like AOL, Yahoo or MSN, we have been licensing our content to them for years and years," he said. "And now Google has agreed to do the same thing, so we are very happy."

A similar deal was reached with the Associated Press last August.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 4:04 PM | Permalink

March 12, 2007

Google News adds feature from Google Blog Search

Google Operating System shows some screen shots that it calls, "Another Step towards Google News - Blog Search Integration." Adding a feature in the left sidebar may or may not be a prelude to integration, but it does raise an interesting question. If mainstream media keep adding blogs and A-List bloggers keep becoming columnists for mainstream media, what is the difference long-term between news search and blog search?

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 8:04 AM | Permalink

February 19, 2007

Google News isn't top dog in UK news search, either

Last week, my article, “Is Google News the Tail Wagging the News Search Dog?,” appeared in Search Engine Watch – just as Search Engine Strategies was getting underway in London. The article cited data showing that Yahoo News and AOL News have larger unique audiences than Google News – in the US. So, what's the story in the UK?

According to comScore Media Metrix, there were 17.3 million unique visitors to General News sites in the UK during December 2006. The #1 site in the category was BBC News, with 7.8 million unique visitors. Yahoo News was #2, with 3.6 million unique visitors. Google News had 2.7 million, The Sun Online had 2.6 million, Guardian.co.uk had 2.5 million, MSN News had 2.4 million, AOL News had 1.9 million, and Times Online had 1.9 million.

UK data from Nielsen//NetRatings provides a similar picture. BBC News ranked #1 in the Online Current Events and Global News Destinations category during December 2006, with 6.2 million unique visitors. Yahoo News was #2 with 2.6 million unique visitors. Guardian Unlimited had 2.1 million unique visitors, Times Online had 1.6 million, The Sun had 1.5 million, Google News had 1.3 million, MSN News & Weather had 1.1 million, and AOL News had 1.0 million.

When I showed this data to people in London last week, many said they were shocked by two findings.

The first was that Yahoo News, not Google News, was the top dog in UK news search.

On the other hand, very few of the people who I talked with in London seemed interested in the strong showing of MSN News or AOL News – or the fact that four of the top eight news sites are news search engines. Most of them appeared to be more concerned about who was on top.

The second shocker was the appearance of The Sun, one of Britain's “red top” tabloids, in the rankings.

Unlike the “quality” newspaper sites in the UK, the red tops feature photos of scantily clad women on Page 3 and sensational stories like the one reporting that “Brit boobs are biggest.” And, going down-market now appears to be as popular a way of building an online audience as developing distinctive journalism that readers cannot find elsewhere.

Meanwhile, very few of the people who saw these findings seemed even remotely interested to hear that the BBC News is optimizing its headlines for news search engines. Most of the “lads” wanted to turn back to The Sun and re-examine Page 3.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 1:48 PM | Permalink

February 13, 2007

The Tail that Wags the News Search Dog

Why does Google News get more press and blog mentions than other news search engines, when Yahoo News and AOL News have larger unique audiences? Greg Jarboe explores that question in today's SearchDay, "Is Google News the Tail Wagging the News Search Dog?"

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 5:04 PM | Permalink

Google News Slapped by Belgian Court

A group of Belgian newspapers on a crusade to remove all their content from news search engines has won a victory against Google, according to a Reuters report.

A Belgian court ruled on Tuesday that Google may not publish in Google News Belgium copyrighted articles from Belgian newspapers managed by Copiepresse, which brought the suit. Copiepresse is also going after Yahoo's site in France to demand it stop showing its content as well.

Google was ordered to stop showing the articles in September 2006, under threat of a potential 1 million euro per day fine, but appealed the decision, which led to this re-hearing. In November, Google settled with two publishing groups that had been in on the original lawsuit. (That post gives a history of the case, as does this FAQ on the settlement).

Today's ruling upholds the existing injunction, but reduces the potential fine to 25,000 euros per day. Content owners must also request by e-mail that their content not be indexed. Google has once again appealed the decision.

UPDATE: Google posted about the Copiepresse decision on the Google Blog, calling the judgment "clearly disappointing," and expressing the intent to appeal.

The post also points out that many publishers are happy to be included in Google News: "Today's ruling does not affect the current content of Google News, because the websites represented by Copiepresse have already been removed from Google News. In fact, hundreds of news publishers in Belgium and around the world are delighted to be included in Google News because it helps more people find their websites and read their articles. That's why Google receives far more requests for inclusion than requests for removal."

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 11:18 AM | Permalink

January 8, 2007

CNN.com to offer comprehensive on-site news search

Shankar Gupta of OnlineMediaDaily reports that CNN.com has selected Inform Technologies to provide an on-site news search engine that "allows users to search other news sources without leaving the CNN site."

Launched in July 2006, Inform's publisher service allows news sites to offer their users comprehensive on-site news search, in the hopes of discouraging Web users from leaving sites to visit news search engines like Google News and Yahoo! News. The service also allows publishers to build special areas on their sites focused on specific topics or keywords.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 8:58 AM | Permalink

December 19, 2006

Top news searches differ from top web searches

When is a search term not a search term? That's a question worth asking after looking at a year's worth of search results on Google, Yahoo and AOL.

Google has just released its 2006 Year-End Google Zeitgeist. To compile its year-end lists and graphs, Google reviewed a variety of the most popular search terms that people typed into its news search engine as well as its web search engine.

Here are the top searches in 2006 on Google News:

1. paris Hilton 2. orlando bloom 3. cancer 4. podcasting 5. hurricane katrina 6. bankruptcy 7. martina hingis 8. autism 9. 2006 nfl draft 10. celebrity big brother 2006

Now, compare the list above with the one below for the top searches in 2006 on Google:

1. bebo 2. myspace 3. world cup 4. metacafe 5. radioblog 6. wikipedia 7. video 8. rebelde 9. mininova 10. wiki

To state the obvious: The top news search terms are completely different from the top web search terms.

If you go to Yahoo's Top Searches of 2006, you will also see some striking differences between Yahoo's Top 10 Searched News Stories of 2006 and Yahoo's list of the most popular web search terms this year.

The tragic passing of Steve Irwin and the mysterious death of Daniel Smith rank as this year's top searched news stories. Interest in the Middle East also dominated the top rankings in 2006, with conflict in Iraq, the Israel Lebanon conflict and the Saddam Hussein trial all ranking well.

Here's Yahoo's list of top news search terms for 2006: 1. Steve Irwin death 2. Anna Nicole's son dies 3. Iraq 4. Israel and Lebanon 5. U.S. elections 6. Fidel Castro stroke 7. North Korea Nuke 8. Jonbenet confession 9. Saddam Hussein trial 10. Danish Cartoon

In other words, it appears that one group of people is turning to Yahoo News Search for hard-hitting information.

Meanwhile, on another part of the portal, Britney Spears topped Yahoo's list of most popular web search terms in 2006 – for the fifth time in six years. The rest of the search engine's overall top 10 searches for the year were dominated by the under 30 celebrity set making a mark on pop culture.

Here's Yahoo's list of top 10 web search terms for 2006: 1. Britney Spears 2. WWE 3. Shakira 4. Jessica Simpson 5. Paris Hilton 6. American Idol 7. Beyonce Knowles 8. Chris Brown 9. Pamela Anderson 10. Lindsay Lohan

In other words, it appears that an entirely different group of people is turning to Yahoo Web Search for celebrity happenings and scandals – or the same group of people is conducting news searches in the office by day and different set of web searches at home by night.

If you go to AOL's 2006 Year End Hot Searches, you'll discover that it, too, appears to have a split personality.

The top 10 news topics at AOL News for 2006 were: 1. Gas prices 2. Steve Irwin 3. Immigration 4. Bird flu 5. Iraq 6. Natalee Holloway 7. Debra Lafave 8. Rush Limbaugh 9. Lebanon 10. Hurricane Katrina In other words, the group of people using AOL News seems interested in “hard news.”

Contrast that with AOL's list of the top 10 web search terms for the year: 1. Weather 2. Dictionary 3. Dogs 4. American Idol 5. Maps 6. Cars 7. Games 8. Tattoo 9. Horoscopes 10. Lyrics

In other words, the group of people using AOL Search seems to be looking for general interest information.

So, why do top news search terms differ so often from top web search terms?

One possible explanation might be demographics and/or psychographics. The smaller group of people using news search may differ demographically and/or psychographically from the larger group of people using web search.

And, who knows, perhaps a higher percentage of news search engine users are older, richer, better educated, and more experienced search users with children and homes in suburbs. Or, maybe web search engine users have different lifestyles, behaviors, interests and values. We can't say.

Why? Because there's another possible explanation: Situational intent. Each of us often acts differently in different situations.

A new eye-tracking study from Enquiro found that “intent impacts searching.” For research-related queries, we tend to “thin slice” sponsored content out of the way. But, for purchase-related queries, we tend to focus more on sponsored content.

So, maybe most of us use web search engines to look for one type of information and we use news search engines to look for another.

While it may not be clear yet why top news search terms often differ from top web search terms, one thing is perfectly clear. They are often different.

So, using web search term research tools like Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery, Yahoo's Keyword Selector Tool, or the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to identify potential web search terms makes a lot of sense. But, if you are trying to optimize a news story or press release, then using these same tools to identify potential news search terms may often produce mixed results.

If you are looking for news search terms, you might get better results using Google Trends, Google Suggest for Google News, the Yahoo News “also try” feature, or Keyword Discovery's news keywords database. But, don't be surprised if their news search term suggestions often seem surprising.

The most popular news search terms are often different from the most popular web search terms. That's a fact you can take to the bank – even if we can't explain why this is true just yet.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 10:52 AM | Permalink

December 12, 2006

Why is “news” a stop word in Google News?

If you use Google News to search for the term, Google News, you are told “news” is a very common word and was not included in your search. That makes sense if you were search for news about Google. But, what if you were searching for news about Google News? You have to conduct a precise search for “Google News” in order to find:

Google News forced to suppress copyrighted images editorsweblog.org - Dec. 12, 2006: Google News, which has usually been resilient when put under copyright pressure issues, suffered a first drawback.

What's Up with Google News and Centcom.mil's Access to It? NewsBusters - Dec 9, 2006: Google has responded, but generically, and poorly. Meanwhile, press releases that verge on being pure pap are routinely displayed in Google News results.

The press vs. Google a copyright case to watch WTN News, WI - Dec. 11, 2006: Does Google News - which displays thumbnail images, headlines, and story leads in connection with links to complete news stories on external websites - infringe copyrights in the original photographs and news stories?

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 10:38 AM | Permalink

November 26, 2006

Google Settles With Some Belgian Publishers Over Belgium News Inclusion

Via Techmeme, news that Google has settled with two Belgian publishing groups involved in a lawsuit against it over content included in Google News Belgium. This comes a day after Google's legal case was reheard in an appeal. The settlement, following what seems a similar settlement with AP earlier this year, seems to open the door that Google is going to continue making such appeasements rather than fight cases in court.

Bloomberg reports that Google struck an agreement with Sofam -- which represents Belgian photographers -- and Scam, which represents Belgian journalists. The agreement allows for Google to use content from these groups (or from their members). Whether they are being paid for this, what content or how it will be used is not explained:

"We reached an agreement with Sofam and Scam that will help us make extensive use of their content," Jessica Powell, a spokeswoman for Google, said in a phone interview yesterday. She declined to give details of the agreement or say whether it involved paying the groups for the content, and declined to say whether Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., was considering similar accords with the newspapers.

In September, Google lost a copyright case filed against it by another Belgian publishing group, Copiepresse. Google later had to post the ruling against it on Google Belgium. However, Google was granted an appeal for the case to be reheard, as it hadn't been represented in court the first time. The stories below provide more background on all of this:

Google's Belgium Fight: Show Me The Money, Not The Opt-Out, Say Publishers (Long look at how the case happened and issues surrounding it)
Google Changes Mind, Posts Belgian Ruling
Google To Go To Belgium Court Finally

At some point, Sofam and Scam joined in the case. I see one reference to this back in October. Two other groups also apparently joined, since the Bloomberg report speaks to the settlement being with two of five total parties to the suit.

Those parties, led by Copiepresse, continue on in their action against Google. That action, as I've covered in my Google's Belgium Fight: Show Me The Money, Not The Opt-Out, Say Publishers article, is far more about trying to pressure Google into a financial arrangement to use Belgian news content than keeping that content out of Google itself. If it was just to keep content out of Google, the publishers could have easily done this through methods such as using robots.txt files.

Copiepresse seems confident of a legal victory:

Speaking on the phone from Brussels after the hearing, Margaret Boribon, the Copiepresse secretary-general, said she felt very happy with how things proceeded today. "I can't see how the judge could change his opinion,'' she said, certain that the court will uphold the September ruling.

Perhaps that legal victory will come, when the ruling is issued in late December or January, when expected. If so, it may not help Copiepresse in the real aim of a financial deal. Google may have enough content to make Google Belgium viable without the participation of the papers Copiepresse represents. They'd then be left in a situation of asking Google for reinclusion or going without the substantial traffic Google News can send web sites.

On the other hand, Google's settlement with the groups following on an agreement earlier this year with the Associated Press seems likely to fuel further publishing groups pushing for such arrangements, especially in smaller markets where key content is put out by a small set of publishers. Banding together and sticking with exclusion, they can severely hamper a news search service.

Norway Upset With Google News Over Copyright Laws covers how Google is being challenged in Norway. That hasn't developed into a legal case yet, but it's hard to see how Google's going to be able to say no to some type of agreement there. Pandia also covers how in Denmark, publisher opposition apparently created the unprecedented case of Google asking for permission to index news sites, rather than the normal case of spidering and requesting an opt-out.

Search Engines, Permissions & Moving Forward In Copyright Battles from me covers how in particular, Google's use of images for its news area is complicates issues and is making it harder for search engines in general to defend opt-out spidering, which I support. That article calls on Google to stop the inclusion of news images, as well as a pullback on showing cached pages and scanning of in copyright works without permission.

However, asking for permission to spider textual content for news search is likely to be as slippery a slope as cutting deals with publishers. It weakens the core legal position Google has argued over gather textual content from the web, most recently against suggested copyright changes in Australia that it said might make search engines unworkable.

As a reminder, Microsoft was also challenged in Belgium. Microsoft Removes Belgian Content Without Court Order covers this more and how Microsoft's reaction was to drop those publications. So far, it hasn't apparently cut a deal for reincluding them and perhaps may not feel a market need to do so.

Judge Gives AFP Case Against Google More Time covers how a copyright case against Google but Agence France Press over news inclusion is still ongoing.

I plan to follow up with Google Monday and see what further details I can gather on the case. I don't expect terms to be disclosed, but it would be good to know if a financial arrangement of some type was reached. That happened in the AP case, though Google was adamant the agreement there was not to allow it to solve a legal problem with spidering.

Many saw this as spin. There are other things the agreement would give Google aside from the right to spider, as my Google-AP Deal Not Pay-Per-Click & Some Further Details covers in more detail. However, it also conveniently solved the spidering issues for Google.

Postscript: See Q&A On Google's Belgium News Agreements for more on this story since it was written.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 5:04 PM | Permalink

November 21, 2006

New Sitemaps For Google News

Is your site included in Google News? Is your site in English? If so, you just got new support from Google Sitemaps. You can submit your news articles for inclusion and also monitor crawling stats. More from Google in Introducing Sitemaps for Google News.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:11 PM | Permalink

Norway Upset With Google News Over Copyright Laws

Pandia reports that Google News is in trouble again over copyright laws overseas. Google News Norway was launched and publishers are upset that Google is placing copyrighted images in the Google News home page. Mediebedriftenes Landsforening, an association of Norwegian media companies, claims Google "cannot make use of photographs without a proper agreement." This form of syndication is in "violation with Norwegian copyright law," says Dagens NÃŠringsliv.

Google is also in trouble over copyright issues in Belgium (also see here and in Australia.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:04 AM | Permalink

A Closer Look at Google's News Archive Search

Google launched its News Archive Search with little fanfare in September, and I found it to be an interesting, useful service. Spend some time playing around with it, though, and you'll find some cool features—and some rough edges, especially if you're accustomed to using fee-based online services such as Factiva or LexisNexis. Guest writer Mary Ellen Bates takes a closer look at the news archives in today's SearchDay article, Google As News Archivist.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 2:54 AM | Permalink

November 8, 2006

In The Election Results Race, Yahoo's The Winner

Like many Americans, I wanted to know what was up with the vote in the US midterm elections this morning. As a search analyst, I then wanted to know how the search engines performed in helping me find out. The results are in! Yahoo's the winner by far, but I'd still take the New York Times over it. Come along for an illustrated tour.

Google told us last month that Google Earth was all geared up to be an election guide. That's great if you've downloaded Google Earth and wanted to learn more before the election. But how about a quick, fast summary of what happened yesterday? What's Google got for us?

The Google home page is as minimal as always, no help there -- not even a special logo as in the 2004 race.

How about a search for "election results," which I think is a fair query to try. After all, using Google Trends, I can see a huge spike for that term after the last elections in the US:

I also checked the volume for just "results," and that was even higher whereas "elections" was much lower (see them all compared here). So my two queries for this test were "election results" and "results." On Google, both disappointed.

Here are election results on Google:

CNN's top with 2004 results! I know -- web search is always behind the times. That's why Google inserts that big news results OneBox unit above the regular results. Let's click on the main news link there, which takes us to news results:

Pretty bad. News about the dollar, stock prices -- but who won?!!! I've got to really work to figure this out, especially compared to the New York Times, as I'll show at the end of this story.

Maybe I head to the actual Google News home page:

Nope. I get some headlines telling me about the Democratic house victory, but it could be much better.

FYI, checking on a search for just results, I don't even get the news headlines inserted. Overall, I found Google to be a pretty poor resource.

How about Yahoo? The home page there immediately gives you some news:

If I actually gravitate to the picture and resist the pull of the search box, the "Full elections coverage" link takes me to a Full Coverage page with lots of info, including an interactive results page (my link takes that out of the normal pop-up box, but it still works great):

This is very, very nice. I can see at a glance who is ahead in the race for control of the US House Of Representatives, plus with a click I can check out the Senate or governor races. Selecting any state also gives me the information about races with that state.

I love this. It very similar to what impressed me at the New York Times. I hope Yahoo searchers found it. However, I suspect many bypassed it. To understand why, let's do that search for election results:

Similar to Google, Yahoo inserts a big "News Results" shortcut unit above the regular results, to help detour searchers into the freshest results. Of course, searcers might bypass that. If so, unlike Google, Yahoo has managed to get the CNN 2006 results page up rather than the CNN 2004 page. Nice. After that, there's Fox News 2006. But c'mon -- Yahoo's own special election results are third. This is one case where I'd totally applaud a little hand manipulation to get that to the top, especially to highlight that interactive results summary page.

Still, the web search results for this particular day at Yahoo far outshine Google. That's almost certainly due to some human editing, which is fine. Along with the sites I've mentioned, you get the New York Times politics page, USA Today's politics page, C-SPAN's 2006 results page, the ABC News politics page, CBS News's 2006 page, politics from the LA Times, then the Washington Post's 2006 results page. All of these are excellent choices. If Yahoo did human intervention to make this happen, kudos to them. You can check out a snapshot of the entire page here.

Over at Google, nothing is either timely or general enough. The Virginia state election board, California election info, assorted things dating from 2004 -- then oddly Virginia and California get another bump for their 2006 pages. Ugh. See the entire list in the snapshot here.

What happens if we detour into the news area that Yahoo promotes at the top of the page? Disappointment:

Yes, relevant news stories. And the image results to the side are kind of fun. But some hand help could have made a difference. How about a promo for that awesome election map of Yahoo's?

Let's go over to Ask, where I had high hopes. Ask has made a big deal of its special Smart Answers for the election, and they are cool. But will I see them? Yes, if I search for election:

I'd also get to this box if I went to the Ask home page and clicked on the Election Day link there:

But for election results (what I believe to be the more popular query), all I get is a small news unit:

The news unit will take me over to some news results, but like Yahoo's, these aren't thrilling. It's pick and choose through what you want, rather than any type of easy overview. As for a search on just results, that doesn't even bring back the news unit at all.

The overall web search results, similar to Google, are underwhelming. Nothing really helpful for the 2006 results pops up (see the full results in the snapshot here).

Even the special Smart Answers box, had it shown up, isn't that helpful for what I want now -- RESULTS! None of the featured links with it takes me to results.

Microsoft, what have you got for me at Windows Live Search? On the home page, nothing. For search on election results, it's disappointing old or non-targeted results (screenshot here). Unlike the others, there are no news results inserted above these. A search for just results is no better. If I specifically try a news search for election results, as with the others, there's no attempt to get me a comprehensive overview. It's up to me to review each story and hope for a good match.

Ironically, at the largely overshadowed MSN site, similar to Yahoo, I get a big election photo on the home page along with links, including one called "state-by-state results" that leads to MSNBC here. And over there is a pretty neat "Democracy Dashboard" giving me that type of overview I wanted:

It's a pity Windows Live didn't reach out to either MSN or MSNBC and do something special to point to this or somehow integrate it into the results.

What about AOL? From the home page, it's pretty easy to spot a link to a AOL election page with results for the House, Senate and more:

Searching for election results brings back disappointing Google listings in the main results. However, the new FullView column does a good job of dividing news into elections overall, US Senate coverage, US House coverage and more. And clicking on any of the "View all" links brings up the special AOL election page (see the full page here).

Now to the New York Times. I headed over there pretty much by chance. There are any number of newspapers I might of thought of off the top of my head, and usually its my original home town paper of the Los Angeles Times. But I hit the NY Times today, and boy was I glad.

Right on the home page, above the "fold" is an easy-to-spot election map. In seconds, it organized the most important information I was looking for into a way for me to know what was going on:

Drilling into the full map was even better. There, I could click on any state -- in particular the undecided ones -- and see the current situation:

Just when I was thinking "what if," I saw the "Create Outcomes" tab where I could click on a state and flip it to the Democrats or the Republicans to see how it might go with the Senate. Outstanding!

Other newspapers or web sites might have done as well with similar displays. If so, my apologies that this wasn't a review of the best election results sites. Instead, it was really meant to see how well the search engines held up as information resources for this particular news event.

Overall, I've written many times before that there's a role humans can play in search results. Today -- this was a perfect example of that. Yahoo almost certainly put some human effort into crafting results, and it was the clear victor in terms of quality of what was coming up in web search listings. AOL comes in second, again where human effort has helped its FullView listings help make up for the poor crawler-based results from Google.

In third, I put Google and Ask. Google's results were poor, but at least it floated some news results that may have helped. Ask, I was rooting for. But that Smart Answers box simply wasn't showing up for the queries I thought people were doing. Even if people were getting it for "election," it wasn't helpful to get election results. I really appreciate the effort, and if this had been for something other than actual results, Ask would have been great. In last place -- Windows Live.

This campaign of sorts is also one of those classic "what if" races. With just a little more effort, Yahoo would have had a landslide victory by getting people to its great overview page. The same is true for AOL. Ask, with just a bit more thought, could have had that box coming up for "election results" rather than just "elections" and added some links to get people to actual results. Windows Live, if it had remembered its MSN origins, might not be in last. And Google? A company that's all about organizing information might not have put in such a poor performance if it used some human power in the way the New York Times did.

Postscript: See also Case Study: Digg Versus Google News Traffic from me on my personal blog that covers how this article ultimately brought in lots of traffic from Google News from those unable to find election results there, along with lots of other data and a comparison to traffic from a top story at Digg on the same day.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 4:17 AM | Permalink

October 24, 2006

Google News Adds Link To Google Blog Search

Google News has added a link on the top right of the home page to Google Blog Search. Also, if you do a search on anything at Google News, such as [google custom search engine] you will see at the bottom of the results, "New! More ways to find the latest on google custom search engine:" and a link to "Search blogs."

Here is an image of the Google News home page highlighting that link:

Yahoo removed blog search results from Yahoo News a while back and we have never heard about it since. Yahoo?

Other coverage of this at Techcrunch, Inside Google, and Matt Cutts.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:38 AM | Permalink

October 17, 2006

Daily Kos Says No Thanks To Google News Inclusion

Via News.com, news of a news site that wants out of Google News not over a copyright dispute but simply because they don't like it. The site is Daily Kos, which explains:

I voluntarily asked for Daily Kos to be removed from Google News since it was returning results from this site that quite frankly weren't up to the sort of standards I expect out of a service offering up credible news. Obviously, I was alone in trying to preserve the integrity of the service. Not even Google News seems to give a damn.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:04 AM | Permalink

October 13, 2006

Google News Mobile In Japan

Reuters reports Google has launched a news portal for the Japanese mobile phone market. The news portal has about 30 news outlets including Asahi newspaper and state-run NHK.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 10:22 AM | Permalink

October 12, 2006

New Interview on Belgian Press vs. Google News (Microsoft Next?)

Sean Daly, from Groklaw, interviewed Margaret Boribon of Copiepresse on September 28th about their copyright lawsuit against Google, which targets the use of Belgian news in Google News, and cached copies of those articles. He has posted their discussion, in English and French, as well as some commentary and analysis of the litigation, including some late breaking news involving demands made by Copiepresse for MSN, and a potential new plaintiff.

I've written a brief synopsis of some of the points she raises in the interview at SEO by the Sea. Danny also talked with Margaret Boribon earlier in September.

Posted by Bill Slawski at 12:32 PM | Permalink

October 6, 2006

Google News - Porn Edition?

Barry Schwartz emailed me to take a look at the entertainment section at Google News a little while ago. No, Google's not gone into porn -- but yes, that's Jessica Simpson nude that accidentally got up on the page. You can see there was story about the movie "Employee of the Month," and the thumbnail picture came from this article about the movie. For family-friendly viewing, I've inserted a tactful black box. Here's the uncensored view of what Google News had.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 4:48 PM | Permalink

October 2, 2006

Copiepresse Upset Ruling On Google Wasn't Visible Enough

Last week, Google complied with a Belgian court order and posted the ruling against it in a copyright suit on the home page of Google Belgium and Google News Belgium, along with many other places including many search results pages. Now via Google Blogoscoped, news that the plaintiff in the case Copiepresse thinks the ruling should have gone at the top of the Google News Belgium page, rather than the bottom.

An article about the issue in Dutch is here. I don't speak Dutch, sadly, consigning me to AltaVista Babelfish, which translated a key part as:

That happened also, but on the start page of Google news, the topicality part of the site, stands the sentence entirely below. And that does not like Copiepresse.

Anyone hitting Google Belgium couldn't have failed to notice the beginning of the very long ruling, as the illustration above shows. But over at Google News Belgium, that ruling wouldn't have been seen unless you scrolled to the bottom of the page, past all the stories. That's what Copiepresse seems to be upset about.

The order did require that:

The defendant to publish, in a visible and clear manner and without any commentary from her part

Copiepresse might well be able to argue that on Google News Belgium, the ruling there wasn't clear and visible by being at the bottom of the page.

Of course, putting the long ruling at the top of the page would have been unworkable. The ruling itself didn't allow Google to put anything on the page directing people to see the notice at the bottom since that might have been deemed "commentary" about the ruling.

What next? If Copiepresse presses for more and wins, perhaps Google might have to run the ruling in a column alongside news content.

Frankly, Copiepresse comes across as petty in complaining here. Google already had a good argument that publishing the ruling was unnecessary given the wide press coverage the ruling had gained, though the court was not convinced and required the ruling to go up anyway. After that happened, coverage of Google's loss was only magnified. The point was made very publicly.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:22 AM | Permalink

September 8, 2006

Google News Archive Search Creep

Earlier this week Google released Google News Archive Search, and I just spotted that database being integrated into Google Search results. I did an ego search on my name, Barry Schwartz and saw at the bottom this:

You can see a full size image here of the Google News Archive Search "creep" into the main Google search results. They are naming it "Archive Search results for barry schwartz" it would be clearer if they used the words, "Archive News Search results for barry schwartz" instead. The result takes you here.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 10:18 AM | Permalink

September 6, 2006

Google Now Searching 200 Years of News

News search services like those offered by Yahoo, Topix.net and Google are great for contemporary events, but none keep stories around for more than a month or so. You can search news going back from many sources farther than that, but all charge for access to read the articles. Google today has launched a hybrid news search service that searches back more than 20 decades, and offers both free and fee-based results. It's an intriguing service, and I've got more details in today's SearchDay article, Google Debuts 200 Year News Archive Search.

Postscript From Danny: Expect us to do a follow up now that the service is actually live. It still looks interesting, but it's also a surprise to see something like google give me a timeline that ends in the 1960. I'm looking forward to playing with it more, plus I'll also post to reviews others are doing. Meanwhile, coverage from elsewhere especially with quotes from content owners participating in the program:

Google News Launches Archive Service with WSJ, NYT, Lexis and Others; No Direct Revenues, PaidContent.org
Google Expands Online News Index, Associated Press
Google Service Lets Users Search For Archived News, Wall Street Journal
Google News adds newspaper archives, Reuters
Techmeme round-up coverage

Posted by Chris Sherman at 12:32 AM | Permalink

August 2, 2006

Google-AP Deal Not Pay-Per-Click & Some Further Details

As it happens, I was at Google yesterday when the story came out about the financial agreement between Google and the Associated Press over the use of AP content. That story raised a number of questions, and here are some answers I can share so far from Google.

First, this is not a pay per click deal. Yesterday's Mercury News article talks about some agreements in general being this way:

It's a common perception, but it's false. Google and Yahoo, along with dozens of other Internet companies, have been quietly agreeing to deals that compensate some of the country's top news organizations for their content and help drive more traffic to their Web sites.

Recently completed deals, which include arrangements in which media organizations such as the Associated Press will be compensated on a pay-per-click basis, could herald a major shift in the relationship between the old media and new Internet gatekeepers.

The article doesn't say that the Google deal specifically is pay per click, but some people might wonder if that's the case. Google now clarifies that it is not.

Is this an agreement to keep Google from being sued by the AP, as it is by the AFP? Google wouldn't answer directly but said:

Google News is fully consistent with fair use and always has been.

Note that paidContent has reported how the AP only a few months ago said:

Let me say more clearly: we're not suing them.

So I tend to think it's safe to say this wasn't being driven out of legal fears.

What's the agreement cover? No more real details than you've already read before:

The license in this agreement provides for new uses of original AP content for features and products we will introduce in the future. We are very excited about the innovative new products we will build with full access to this content.

But note that this specifically talks about new uses -- not current uses. IE, I read this as Google saying again that what it has been doing to index AP content is not something it feels it needed an agreement to do.

Also this tidbit:

This is not the first time we've had a financial arrangement with a news organization.

Coincidentally, I'm at news search site Topix today, literally borrowing a conference room to do some email and blogging catch-up. I had a catch-up meeting with them earlier, and the issue of deals with the AP and newspapers in general came up.

Topix noted they signed an agreement with the AP earlier this year, which is part of an overall trend where they've seen news organizations eager to come up with new ways to work with news search sites.

Was this prompted by a legal fear? No. It was part of figuring out a way of dealing with syndicated news content that helps treat the AP's member publications fairly online.

AP stories can originate from one of thousands of member publications. Any of those thousands of member publications might also republish an AP story. Which story is the originating one? That's useful for a search engine to know, if you don't want your results to get overwhelmed by having duplicates of all the same content.

In terms of fairness, Topix uses the agreement to get a rich data feed of content from the AP (along with many other things). This helps them better understand if an AP story originated from a particular member publication and, if so, to link over to the publication that deserves the credit.

The agreement also allows Topix to put AP-originated national and international stories on its own site, rather than having to guess at which of many different news sites to point at.

For example, if the AP runs some international story that an AP reporter has written, how should Topix decide which newspaper to point at? Just pick some random newspaper that had nothing to do with creating it? And if so, what about registration or payment issues that might be in place at that random paper.

Hosting AP national and international stories helps solve this problem. Of course, hosting AP stories that come from the AP directly also means Topix -- and indirectly the AP -- can earn from ad revenue.

Understanding what Topix does with the AP shed sheds some light on possible Google motivations in working with the AP. Perhaps we'll see hosted stories as Topix is doing -- and as Yahoo also does -- for some of the reasons explained above. And perhaps the deal also is to give Google better news search capabilities as I've also outlined, something that's hard to do without a deeper relationship.

Postscript: Google, AP Disclose News Payment Deal from, ironically, the Associated Press suggests that a legal dispute was behind the deal. From the lead:

Google Inc. is paying The Associated Press for stories and photographs, settling a dispute with a major provider of the copyright news that the online search engine finds and displays on its popular Web site.

But further into the story, I don't see anything explicitly supporting that statement. There's this:

While AFP sued to protect its rights, the AP chose to negotiate terms with Google, which, after just seven years of existence, is nearly 10 times larger than the 160-year-old news cooperative in terms of revenue. The AP, a not-for-profit organization owned by U.S. news companies, had revenues of $654 million in 2005. Google, a publicly owned company, reported $6.1 billion in revenue last year and is on a pace to exceed $9 billion this year.

By agreeing to pay AP for content, Google falls in line with the owners of other popular news sites like Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, which have been anteing up for years.

"We are happy to be dealing with Google as we are with all the major superpowers on the Internet," Seagrave [Jane Seagrave, the AP's vice president of new media markets] .said. "We are always looking for new ways to innovate."

But there's no one from the AP explicitly attributed in the story as saying that the AP was going to sue unless this agreement was reached. Still, I know the story author Michael Liedtke well, and I can't see him saying there was a dispute unless someone was saying that was what this about. I assume that would have been Jane Seagrave.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:46 PM | Permalink

August 1, 2006

Google Paying News Sites For Google News Syndication?

Philipp Lenssen has some details on Google paying some news sources, such as the Associated Press, for syndicating their content in Google News. Philipp initially posted the story based on a Mercury News article that was foggy on the details of such relationships. But then Philipp received a statement from Google that read:

Google has always believed that content providers and publishers should be fairly compensated for their work so they can continue producing high quality information. We are always working on new ways to help users find the information they are looking for, and our business agreement with the Associated Press is one example of that.

Now, it is hard to know what this exactly means. Is Google paying the AP for allowing them to crawl and include their content in the Google News index? Will Google be creating a news portal, similar to Yahoo News (Yahoo has long paid to host some news content, though the story suggests Yahoo might be doing more of this). It is still unclear. How does Google determine who to pay and how much to pay? Can you pay Google to be included in Google News? Very interesting discovery by Philipp and I look forward to understanding this in more detail soon.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:45 AM | Permalink

July 31, 2006

Google News Search Engine Explained

Philipp Lenssen has an excellent write up on How Google News Indexes. He goes through how news sources get included, how news stories are clustered together, which sources get found on the Google News home page, and then some other tips. Philipp also explains how the news breaking source normally gets the top spot in the results and how to create content specifically for Google News. This can make a very useful and interesting read for anyone interested in Google News.

I also wrote about Submitting Your News Site To Google News back in June.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:42 AM | Permalink

July 18, 2006

AFP Content Still In Google News, Probably Via AFP's Own Partners

"Despite suit, Google News still indexing AFP content" from IDG News Service covers Agence France Press content still appearing in Google News after the company said last year that it would no longer carry AFP content, following a copyright infringement lawsuit. The problem seems to be that AFP content is distributed by other publishers, such as the New York Times.

There's no foolproof way for Google to flag these articles as AFP content and thus remove them. Honestly, it's down to AFP itself to teach its distributors to learn out to use the meta robots tag to flag this content as not to be indexed.

Then again, I'm sure that over time, the situation will resolve itself. After all, if AFP is stupid enough not to understand the value of search traffic, smarter publications that do understand this like the New York Times itself will overtake it as people turn to them for content online.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 5:18 AM | Permalink

June 13, 2006

Submitting Your News Site To Google News

Google News can drive a nice amount of traffic to a site. A few months ago, I had the privilege of having my site included in Google News. Since then others have been asking the question, how can I get my news site included in Google News? This morning, I did my best to answer the question with a post named Getting Into Google News Revisited. I outlined the technical requirements, the editorial requirements and what you can do to encourage Google to accept you into Google News. If you are interested in Google News inclusion, check it out.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:46 AM | Permalink

May 26, 2006

Google Dropping Conservative Sites?

Is Google Dropping Conservative Sites They Disagree With? from Jennifer Laycock at Search Engine Guide is an interesting article regarding the possibility that Google is dropping sites from their index due to their political content. Jennifer has done some excellent digging around into some of the allegations surrounding the issue. However, the interesting, larger point is the extent to which Google (or indeed any other search engine) has a responsibility to be impartial in the information they provide, for financial reasons if no other.

Posted by Phil Bradley at 5:12 AM | Permalink

May 23, 2006

Google Removing News Sources For Hate Speech

NewsBusters.org reports that Google has removed two sites from the Google News index for "hate speech." Google cited three examples of articles that Google News readers reported to them, including this one and this one. Philipp Lenssen has a nice write up on the subject here. It is also important to note that Google has not removed the site from the Google Web search index, site:www.michnews.com returns almost 33,000 results.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:02 AM | Permalink

May 1, 2006

Google Suggest For Google News

Google announced that they have added the Google Suggest feature to Google News. To try Google Suggest for Google News out, visit http://news.google.com/news?complete=1. This is a nice feature to help people narrow down the news searches they perform.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:08 AM | Permalink

March 30, 2006

Optimize Your Blog For Google Finance

Danny mentioned in his write-up on Google Finance that it shows both Google News results and Google Blog Search results on the stock results landing page. Now Seth Finkelstein offers a few tips on perhaps enhancing your chances of showing up for a stock search in the blog posts section of Google Finance. The basics are to use the full company name in your blog title, and you have a pretty good shot of being included on the page.

For more information on Google Blog Search, see here. Plus look at Thoughts On & Poking At Google Blog Search to understand there's even a chance a blog might be in news search and blog search.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 11:29 AM | Permalink

March 22, 2006

A Deeper Look At Personalized News Search Engines

Mark Glaser at MediaShift wrote a great review named Your Guide to Personalized News Sites. He reviews the history of personalized news sites, and discusses many of the new free options people have to search news with a personal touch. Here is a listing of some of the engines he reviewed;

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:31 AM | Permalink

March 16, 2006

Google News Prank Confirmed; News Source Removed From News Index

Nathan Weinberg reports that I Newswire, a free press release distribution service has been removed from the Google News index after releasing a false press release submitted by a teenager. The 15-year-old teenager, Thomas Vendetta, wrote a press release prank, saying that Google hired him. The news got digged and then the prank was uncovered when the teenager confessed at his blog. Information Week reports, "the distributor of the release has been removed as a source for the automated news service."

I covered a Search Engine Watch thread named Press Release Spam back in May of 2005. Some of the press release distributors seem to be getting better. But as more and more press release distribution companies get into the business, it becomes a bigger and bigger issue for news search.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:59 AM | Permalink

March 8, 2006

Google News Israel Launched

Google announced that they have launched Google News for Israel last night. Google News Israel syndicates many Israeli news sources in Israel's native language, Hebrew. My Hebrew isn't that great, but if you want more information about Google News Israel and you can read Hebrew, visit the About Google News Israel page. Search Engine Journal notes that many publishers were "caught off guard" by this launch and they feel there are "copyright infringement" legal issues with Google News. SEJ also notes that Google did have an opt out policy in place prior to launching Google News Israel.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 10:45 AM | Permalink

January 25, 2006

Scoop: Google News Leaves Beta!

Google News has officially grown up, after more than three years in development. "Thats one beta down, only 237-ish to go!" qipped Google uber-engineer Matt Cutts in his blog. Guest writer Greg Jarboe has more, including some interesting traffic stats about online news sites, in today's SearchDay article, Beyond Beta: Google News Graduates.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 10:02 AM | Permalink

January 23, 2006

Bye Bye Beta: Google News is a Beta No More

And you thought that Google News would always be in beta. (-: Well, that's no longer the case. As of today, approximently 1219 days (29,256 hours) after the Google News that we know today launched in beta, Google has gone ahead and removed the beta monniker from all English langauge editions of the service. Editions of Google News in other languages remain in beta.

Currently, 22 regional editions of Google News in 10 languages are available.

What's New According to a Google spokesperson, adding the new personalization features that went live on Friday night were the last things Google wanted to offer before taking the service out of beta. For a look at these new personalization options take a look at this post: Google News Launches Recommendation Service, List of Popular Stories Also Now Available.

Sources The publicly announced total of English language news sources aggregated via News.google.com remains remains listed at 4500 on the Google News home page but as this "about page" points out that it's more than 4,500 English-language news sources. Precisely how many more? Google isn't saying. Topix.net claims they crawl more than 12,000 mainstream sources and 15,000 blogs and also offer more than 360,000 topical pages. RocketNews offers content from more than 16,000 news sources and even more feeds. NewsNow aggregates content from about 22,000 mainstream news and blog sources.

Words from the Developer The developer of Google News, Krishna Bahrat, has shared his thoughts on the Google Blog.

A Bit of History Google News (as we know it today) officially debuted on September 23, 2002 as a "revamp" of the news site the were already providing (here's SearchDay's initial overview) and since then many have wondered when, if ever, it would leave beta. Well, they don't need to wonder anymore.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:24 PM | Permalink

January 21, 2006

Google News Launches Recommendation Service, List of Popular Stories Also Now Available

According to a post from Micro Persuasion, Google has launched personalized news recommendation service on the Google News site if and only if you're logged in to your Google account.

The new feature offers story recommendations "based on what you've searched for and clicked on" in the past. Make sure your Google Personalized Search is active.

This page has more info about personalized news search.

Here's a look at what I found after spending a small amount of time on the site.

In the left column, you'll find a "most popular" link. I'm assuming this lists the most popular stories clicked on by Google News users for a given period of time. I can't find any documentation as to how often this page is updated but I'll check with Google on Monday.

Yahoo News has offered a most popular, most recommended and most emailed feature for years. From what I can tell, at least as of now, only one "popular" list is available from Google while Yahoo offers "popular" lists broken down into various news categories. Both services offer these lists via syndication.

The other new feature from Google is called "Recommended for XXX (Your Gmail address)" and can be found directly below the Top Stories on the Google News home page. On my page, three stories (the max) were recommended.

This help page explains how some of this works.

By signing in to personalized news and keeping Personalized Search enabled, you allow Google to track and save your news selections. Then, Google News can automatically recommend relevant stories just for you by using smart algorithms that analyze your selections. The algorithms compare your tastes to the aggregate tastes of other groups of similar Google News users. Simply put, we recommend news stories to you that have been read by many other users who've also read similar stories as you in the past.

In addition to the three recommended stories listed on the Google News home page, you should also see a new selection in the far left column labeled "Recommended." In my situation tonight, I found about 20 recommended stories listed. Of course, it would seem to make sense that the number of recommendations would be related to how much you've clicked and read using Google News, the Google Personalized being active, and the amount of content that Google believes is relevant.

I checked a few (not all) of Google's country sites that offer news like Google News Canada, Google News New Zealand and Google News UK and noticed the recommendation and popular story features were available. I also check Google News for a few non-English speaking countries and did not notice these features. For example, Google News Argentina and Google News Italy.

As to the quality and usefulness of the recommendations, it's going to take some time to determine what Google suggests is useful and worthy of a click. I'm going to give it a few weeks.

Of course, Google is by no means the first service to recommend news stories it thinks might be of interest. I've blogged about and used Findory since it first launched and have found many stories I would have otherwised missed without it. Findory also recommends material from blogs and can even function as an RSS aggregator that will also recommend stories you might find interesting. I'm still hoping that Greg Linden (Findory's CEO) and his team develop a mobile version of the service.

Other services that recommend news stories using different types of technology including collaborative filtering (this is not a comprehensive list) include MSNBC Newsbot, Gixo, TailRank, Memeorandum.

Here are four screen caps. 1 ||| 2 ||| 3 ||| 4

Postscript: Findory CEO Greg Linden shares his thoughts here along with offering his thoughts on how Google's personalization technology is operating.

Postscript 2 If you're not seeing any recommended headlines, select and click on a few stories and then refresh the page. Google News is only going to show you recommended headlines when it thinks it has some for you.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:00 AM | Permalink

August 9, 2005

Get Google News Search Results as RSS or ATOM Feeds

Google has just joined many news engines (Topix.net, Findory, Yahoo News, RocketNews, and others) and is now officially making Google News search results available as RSS or ATOM feeds. You're also able to create feeds from customized Google News pages as well as various Google News sections (business, technology, etc.). Google's email-based alerts remain available.

You'll find the details, examples, and terms of use here.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:56 PM | Permalink

June 13, 2005

Yahoo News Beats Google News In Jackson Verdict

The fact that Google News uses automation to decide what to feature on its home page versus Yahoo employing human editors is often raised as a issue when comparing the services. In the case of the Michael Jackson trial, it looks like the humans won out. I've been watching both this afternoon to see how they responded to the not guilty verdicts in the case. All times listed are Eastern Daylight Savings Time.

Approximately 3:50pm, Word Breaks that Verdict will be Read
Approximately 4:00pm, Top Story at Yahoo News
Approximately 4:27pm, Top Story at Google News

Note: The MJ story was listed at the top of Google News "Entertainment" section several minutes before being listed as a Top Story. Then, it was listed as only a headline in "Top Stories" before moving to one of the two top two stories (posted with image) on the left side of the "Top Stories" section.

Approximately 5:14pm, Verdicts Begin Being Read
Approximately 5:18pm, Reading of Verdicts Ends
Approximately 5:19pm, Michael Jackson Acquitted Top Story on Yahoo News
Approximately 5.41pm, Michael Jackson Not Guilty Listed Top Story at Google News

Again, listed a few minutes earlier in the Entertainment section of Google News.

Posted by Gary Price at 6:29 PM | Permalink

May 20, 2005

Google News Study Finds Bias But Not Favoritism -- But Study Also Has Flaws A study has found that Google News results are significantly more likely to have an ideological bias than Yahoo News, though the bias will be on both ends of the spectrum.

Caveat alert! The study involved only one particular type of story -- those related to the 2004 US presidential election. Findings on one story do not indicate the situation with other types.

You can read a summary of the study in Non-traditional sources cloud Google News results from Online Journalism Review. The full study in PDF format is available here. Below, I'll highlight the findings and then give my own comments:

Findings

Bias was almost entirely attributed to "non-traditional" news sources. In other words, if all those non-traditional sites had been dropped, Google would have been seen as the same as Yahoo.
Stories coming up for searches on "George W. Bush" and "John Kerry" were analyzed.
Checks for stories were done every four hours in the two weeks before the actual election, resulting in 80 "snapshots."
Five snapshots were chosen randomly, then the first five articles in each were analyzed.
If articles required payment, a short "free" version was used if offered, otherwise the article was skipped and the "next highest" article was used.
Articles were analyzed sentence-by-sentence to check for bias in a particular direction. Reviewers were given a code to determine if they reflected bias.
Reviewers were also asked to rate stories overall, rather than on a sentence-by-sentence basis.
Despite acknowledging some weaknesses in using candidate names (and exactly what style), the study used them anyway saying it emulated what an average user would do.
While Google was found to have bias, it was more biased in both directions. In other words, Yahoo's results were more balanced overall. Google had balance and extremes at either end. It wasn't seen as slanted more or less toward liberal/conservative or Bush/Kerry.

My Observations

First, the study singles-out Google for not listing its sources. As a reminder, neither does Yahoo nor most any other news search engine I can think of, as I've written before.

Next, the study doesn't show any data of how an "average user" might search for either candidate or indeed, for information about the election at all. So when I'm told that using names in this way they were used in the way typical people might, I'm not reassured unless I see some query logs.

Most important, the study doesn't seem to take the clustering of news stories that Google does into account. Google will "cluster" similar stories under each other like this generated in a query I did on the word bush at Google News:

Bush May Risk Court Deadlock With Unpopular Choice (Update1) Bloomberg - 21 hours ago May 19 (Bloomberg) -- President George W. Bush would risk a deadlocked US Supreme Court were he to choose someone ``way out of the mainstream'' to fill a ... Reid: Bush, GOP Seek to Reinvent Reality ABC News Reid: Bush, GOP Seek to Reinvent Reality Guardian Unlimited Possible Supreme Court Vacancy Said Driving Senate Battle Over ... Black Enterprise Savannah Morning News - San Francisco Chronicle - all 2,284 related »

Social Security adviser casts doubt on Bush plan Chicago Tribune, IL - 6 hours ago WASHINGTON -- Robert Pozen, the business executive who developed the theory behind President Bush's plan to trim Social Security benefits in the future, urged ... How Bush Makes Sure They Agree Los Angeles Times Investment chief questions Bush plan Boston Globe Bush Committed to Private Accounts Plan ABC News Kansas City Star - Washington Post - all 265 related »

Bush would veto House bill on stem cells Reuters - 1 hour ago WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush said on Friday he would veto legislation that would loosen restrictions on embryonic stem cell research and expressed ... Bush Vows Stem Cell Veto CBS News Bush threatens veto on stem cell research bill CNN Bush Says He'd Veto Bill Easing Stem Cell Fund Limits (Update1) Bloomberg news4colorado.com - FXstreet.com - all 229 related »

Bush should have been told of plane scare - wife Reuters - 45 minutes ago AMMAN (Reuters) - Contradicting the White House line, US first lady Laura Bush said on Thursday the president should have been interrupted during a bike ride ... Mrs. Bush's 5-Day Mideast Mission CBS News Mrs. Bush: Trip Should've Been Interrupted Washington Post Mrs. Bush Says President's Bike Trip Should Have Been Interrupted ... KOTV Expressindia.com - all 85 related »

Bush cheers FCAT scores for reading Sun-Sentinel.com, FL - 2 hours ago ... The results left Gov. Jeb Bush expressing confidence the state was moving in the right direction, despite problems in the upper grades. ... FCAT scores show Dade closing gap Miami Herald FCAT Scores Rise for Students in Grades 3 through 10 WJXX Younger students fare best on FCAT Gainesville Sun Tampa Tribune - Palm Beach Post - all 81 related »

Now which five links are you counting? The ones shown in bold represent the links that are actually biggest on the Google News page. The other links are in a smaller font. Do you count the first five links you come to, or just the first biggest links. From what I can tell, the study counted just the biggest ones.

That makes a big difference when comparing to Yahoo. Yahoo doesn't cluster results, so it will show less diversity at a glance. In other words, Yahoo might show 10 stories that same the same thing, keeping alternative views out. In my experience, Google is better at clustering all 10 similar stories under one major headline/link, allowing others stories on slightly different topics/angles to emerge.

Here are more examples, to show this better. Going back to the list above, this is what you get if you count only the biggest/bold links:

As you can see, there are five different stories involved (Judicial Appointments, Social Security, Stem Cell Resarch, Plane Scare & FCAT scores).

Now compare to the first five stories listed at Yahoo News for bush:

As you can see, there are essentially only two stories represented (Iraq, Stem Cell Research)

Now go back to Google. Let's say you took the first five news links -- not the biggest/bold news links, but literally the first five actual article links you came to, just as is the case with Yahoo

Now you can see only one story is represented -- that of the fight over judicial appointments.

And the point is? Google's system allows more different stories to appear in response to a query, if you count the biggest links. That means you may end up with more diversity in views -- and yes, more bias. But count things differently, and that might go away.

It's also somewhat troubling that if a story couldn't be read without paying, it was dismissed. Yahoo has agreements with major publishers so stories can be read right on its site. Google does not. By dismissing some inaccessible stories, further skewing or bias may have been brought into the study.

Overall, it's an interesting look, but I find it hard to feel that it concludes anything.

Want to comment? Please join our forum thread, Google News Unbiased When Blogs Left Out?

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 1:25 PM | Permalink

May 6, 2005

Reuters Reports on the Google News Patent Story

This time around, Reuters takes a look at the Google News patent story that's been making the rounds over the past week. I find it interesting that most of the coverage has made no mention of the fact that the patent application was filed with the USPTO almost 18 months ago.

However, kudos to Lisa Batelein for including the fact in her Reuters article:

A Google spokesman confirmed that the company has applied for the patents but declined further comment regarding whether the company will use or is already using the technology. Google filed its U.S. patent application in September 2003 and it is in line for review by patent examiners.

Like I said last week, just because Google filed for a patent (in 2003) doesn't necessarily mean the company is waiting for the patent to be granted to begin using the concepts it describes.

I'm happy to see that Lisa went and talked with Rich Skrenta, the founder of one of my favorite new resources of 2004, Topix.net. Topix.net crawls and aggregates (also keyword searchable) material from more than 12,000 sources vs. Google's 4500. More about the Topix.net NewsRank algorithm here.

Bartlein ends her article by writing, Yahoo gathers news from disparate sources via direct feeds and a Web crawler. But unlike Google News, Yahoo News employs human editors and carries advertising.

She's on target regarding how Yahoo gathers news and displays it on various Yahoo News pages. However, a Yahoo News search results page is built algorithmically, without the involvement of any human editors. This is the same way Google News search results pages are built.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:03 PM | Permalink

May 2, 2005

Gmail Web Clips: More On Google's Feed Aggregator, Plus Feeds From Google News

Checking my Gmail account today, I discovered that I'm apparently now one of the few with access to the new Gmail "web clips" feed reading feature I mentioned earlier. Here's how it works and some more details.

You'll see feed headlines shown at the top of the Gmail page, above all the messages in your Inbox, when viewing an email or anything within Gmail. Here's a screenshot:

In that example, "Reuters: Oddly Enough" is the title of the feed currently being viewed. Next to it is a headline from that feed, the hyperlink taking you to the article or post. Next to that is the time the article was posted.

See the words "Web Clip" and the little < > arrows next to it? Those let you move forward or backwards through headlines in the feeds you've subscribed to.

That's it -- a rudimentary feed reader, to say the least. Unless I'm missing something, that's all you can do to view your feeds. You can't click on anything to see all headlines from a particular feed. You can't see a single page with headlines from all sources -- much less headlines and descriptions. All you can do is keep clicking the little arrows.

Odd? Yeah, but I'm sure we'll see it develop. So far, it really seems designed as a serendipitous thing. As you read different email messages, the headlines keep changing -- so it's an easy way to read mail and also perhaps spot a new news item. Or ads! That's because AdSense ads sometimes appear in that area, as well.

Google's Default & Suggested Feeds

By default, you're already subscribed to three feeds:

Why these three? All Google will say is that they were hand-picked with a focus on a good user experience and high quality content.

Want more? Use the Settings option in Gmail, then the Web Clips option. Look below your subscribed feeds, and there's an "Add more clips" link. In turn, that lets you pick from choices in News, Business, Lifestyle, Fun, Tech and Sports categories.

How did the 10 or so feeds featured in each category -- such as ABC News, NPR, Slashdot and Yahoo News: Most Emailed -- get such favored status? Again, Google said only that the choices were hand picked with a focus on user experience.

Google News Gains Feeds

By the way, Google News has some of its own feeds in there:

Google News - World
Google News - Business
Google News - Entertainment
Google News - Health
Google News - Sports

Yes, that's right. You can actually get Google News content through a feed without having to resort to workarounds. But bad news, non-Gmail folks. These feeds only work for those within Gmail. I can't find a published address for them. That's kept hidden within Gmail.

You can get Google News alerts for any keyword you wish to track, of course -- but that's sent via email. In contrast, Yahoo News offers actual news feeds to the public right now, as described more here: Yahoo Gains Financial Feeds; A Revisit To Yahoo News Feeds

Also noteworthy is that the feed reader functionality changes slightly when viewing a Google News feed. A new "related articles" link appears next to the posting time and the "Web Clip" text next to the arrows changes to Google News, as shown below:

Add Any Feed & When's This Coming To Everyone?

What if you want something beyond the feeds Google recommends? No problem. You can easily add any feed you like using the Custom Clips option. Just enter the URL of the feed, and away you go.

So I'm lucky in that my Gmail account is enabled -- how about everyone else? Google says it's just a small randomly selected test right now and there's no clear timing on when it will be rolled out to more people. In the meantime, the clipless such as Steve Rubel will have to read about web clips via the Google help pages that he spotted:

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:49 PM | Permalink

April 28, 2005

Google News Patent & What May (Or May Not) Be Happening

Barry Fox's article, Google searches for quality not quantity, at New Scientist discusses a recently published Google patent application (not an awarded patent, yet) about concepts that Google News is possibly using in its algorithm.

Fox writes,

Google has plans that will dramatically improve the results of internet news searches, by ranking them according to quality rather than simply by their date and relevance to search terms.

The article and the patent app itself are interesting reads and could shed some light about how Google News ranks articles. However, to use the phrase "has plans" might be a bit strong. Why?

Fox fails to mention that this patent application was filed with the USPTO about 18 months ago, on September 16, 2003 to be precise. This means that it's very likely that one/some/many/all or none of the concepts are already being utilized in the Google News algorithm.

I've been compiling search related patents for a couple of years (look for a new update in SearchDay soon) and it's important to remember that it can take a long time from first filing a patent application to the time it's published and then awarded. This doesn't mean reviewing patents isn't useful and interesting, far from it, just something to keep in mind.

Btw, here's a link to the full text of the patent app: Systems and methods for improving the ranking of news articles.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:08 PM | Permalink

April 18, 2005

Overture Becomes Yahoo Search Marketing & Comparing Listing Products At Yahoo To Google

The rebranding promised in March has happened. Overture has officially become Yahoo Search Marketing, marked by the launch of a new Yahoo Search Marketing site that lists all of Yahoo's search-related listing products.

It's a good change that ought to help new advertisers. Rather than having to explain that they need to buy "Overture" to be on Yahoo, Yahoo can now direct them to a site that retains its branding.

But with rebranding can come confusion, so I thought it would be helpful to look at all the products listed at the new site and also compare them to Google products. In particular, an email I got from a reader prompted the idea:

I am trying to find the "comparable" Yahoo program to Google AdWords. Since their rebranding of Overture last week, I'm still looking unsuccessfully for something like Precision Match, but it looks as if the program has been axed?

We've been using Google AdWords since it launched and are very happy with the format and back office (most of all the results). Is Yahoo offering a similar program? Honestly, I've read about their "Sponsored Search" and it's simply not obvious.

Meanwhile at our Search Engine Watch forums, a thread on the rebranding shows similar confusion:

I thought Overture was being renamed to Yahoo Search Marketing, but this page boasts a range of products, including Shopping, Travel, Directory, PPI & Overture (sponsored search).

The chart below gives you a side-by-side look at all the products listed on the new Yahoo site, along with some other listings areas that I thought made sense to add. If you're a Search Engine Watch member, see this extended post that provides commentary and additional advice and information about each listing area.

Listing Type Yahoo Google Web Search Listings Yahoo Submit Your Site Add Your URL To Google Web Search Paid Inclusion Search Submit Express & Search Submit Pro n/a (but advertisers can get listing support) Search Ads (Paid Placement) Sponsored Search AdWords (search targeted) Contextual Ads Content Match AdWords (content-targeted; AdSense is name for PUBLISHER program) Shopping Listings Product Submit Froogle Feed (free) Travel Listings Travel Submit n/a Directory Listings Directory Submit ODP Submit Local Search Ads Local Sponsored Search AdWords Regional & Local Targeting Local Search Listings Local Enhanced Listings & Local Listings (free) Google Local Business Center News Listings Yahoo News Submissions Google News Source Suggestion

Want to discuss the change from Overture to Yahoo? Visit our forum thread, Yahoo! Search Marketing is Released. Also check out Yahoo To Buy Overture for background on Yahoo buying Overture back in 2003, GoTo Makes Overture To New Name for the last rebranding Overture went through, that of losing it original name of GoTo back in 2001 and GoTo Sells Positions, about GoTo's launch in 1998.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:48 AM | Permalink

March 29, 2005

On Yahoo's Mojo & The Tiresome Need For Perspective

I'd largely agree with Om Malik's idea that Yahoo is a sharper company that seen in the past, which he addresses in his How Yahoo Got Its Mojo Back. But perhaps a little perspective is in order. Some selected points and counterpoints:

Many starting to see that many of Google's forays into anything but search have been like its search results lately - off target.

Hey, I agree Google results don't feel as good as they have in the past, but neither do I feel that Yahoo's results are somehow superior. Instead, they both feel equal to each other. In short, be wary of anyone who simply declares whether search results are relevant or not without some type of backup of how exactly this is being declared so.

Google News and Froogle - well I think Jeff Jarvis has some choice words about that.

The choice words about Google News are the fact that you don't get a list of what sites Google considers news, something I'll be revisiting more in a future post. How about some transparency, Google! News flash -- Yahoo News doesn't provide transparency either. Over 7,000 news sources are declared here by Yahoo News but no list is provided, not even if you drill down as suggested into categories or use the advanced news search page. It lets you narrow by source -- but it doesn't tell you what all the news sources are.

In fact, it's typical that over the years when Search Engine Watch comes across a new news search site, we ask for a list of all sources, which are never provided. It's great that more people are demanding that Google provide a list, but it shouldn't be held to a higher standard than Yahoo or others. They should provide lists, as well.

AdWords/AdSense are great, but prone to click fraud.

I just sat on a clickfraud panel at our SES New York show earlier this year, and the audience was hardly saying that Yahoo was somehow immune to clickfraud. There are concerns with both Google and Yahoo. And if Yahoo expands its own contextual ads programs, clickfraud will expand right along with it.

What it also has a couple of guys, I like to call them blog evangelists, who knowingly or not, have brought the right kind of attention to the company. Russell Beattie who recently joined Yahoo has been blogging furiously (much to my annoyance) about Yahoo and its wireless efforts. In normal course of events, Yahoo would have issued a press release, and many of us would have paid little or no attention. Jeremy Zawodny is the other and has helped the company focus on some of the newer social media trends.

Now here's where Om's more on target to me. Yahoo seems to do much better than Google in the blogosphere. Jeremy's been out there for ages, far ahead of Yahoo itself and helping bring the company into embracing the concept of blogging. The Yahoo Search Blog as I've written before is often refreshingly non-corporate. Meanwhile, non-traditional Google has an oddly stiff corporate blog and keeps its chief personality, GoogleGuy, hidden behind a cloak of anonymity. More on this in my past post: Jeremy Zawodny: Yahoo Search Blogvangelist.

In an effort to best Google, the company has upped its free email storage to one gigabyte. Yahoo offered desktop search tool, just like Google.

Here, ironically, Yahoo has been playing catch-up. It would still be charging for significant email storage and offering terrible email searching, if it hadn't been for Google pushing it forward with Gmail. Desktop search is again an area where Google beat it and redefined how we traditionally thought of desktop search. It could be fast, free and easy to download and install.

More important, Gmail, Google Desktop and Google Maps are all examples of what I call "pulling a Google," where the company breaks the mold of how we traditionally think a product should be. Gmail said web based email could give you massive storage and be searchable. Desktop search, I've already noted Google changes in that space. Google Maps made the click and zoom model for maps seem archaic.

Believe me, I've been very, very impressed with much of what Yahoo's done over the past year in the area I watch, search. It massively improved web search (though disappointingly still doesn't provide good enough transparency on paid inclusion). Shopping search, local search are products that feel much more refined than their Google counterparts. Yahoo Images expanded last year, while Google Images was stale for more than six months. Personalized search through My Yahoo Search looks promising and hopefully will eventually get out of beta. Yahoo moves on blog and feed searching are also impressive, especially when Google has done nil in that area.

But when many where enthralled about how wonderful Google was, I almost felt tiresome in having to go back and sound a reality check on some accolades it would get. Some examples:

In 2004, the New York Times runs an article about "searching" that as I note assumes that Google is the only search engine out there, ignoring Yahoo.
In 2003, the New York Times has a column suggesting that Google is godlike in knowing everything. As today, I urge that perspective is sorely needed.
In 2002, a "The Age Of Google" article suggests that before Google, we found nothing. I strongly disagreed (scroll down to the Search Engine Articles section for my comments).

I was far from the only one saying that Google wasn't perfect. I know my fellow editors Chris Sherman and Gary Price made and wrote similar comments, as did people far and wide across the web. But these voices were often lost in all the Google love out there.

As with Google, so too Yahoo. Perspective is always helpful. We may be entering a "Yahoo's Hot; Google's Not" time among the "chattering classes" as Om calls them. But that isn't the same as "Yahoo's In; Google's Out" overall. Even when Google was seen as the hottest thing going, Yahoo still kept many, many of its loyal users. Similarly, while Google is taking many PR hits, that's not necessarily meaning that it's actually losing the less chattering users that depend on it.

The reality is that both companies have strengths and weaknesses. The competition between them is ultimately good news, in that they should stay on their toes and benefit us all.

Postscript: Yahoo's Jeremy Zawodny in Getting our Mojo at Yahoo? Yeah. And some new DNA too comments on some of the reasons why he feels the company has gained more attention recently.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 1:36 PM | Permalink

March 22, 2005

Google News Says Au Revoir to Agence France Press Content

Less than a week after Agence France Press (AFP) filed a lawsuit against Google alleging copyright infringement of its content by Google, the folks in Mountain View will no longer index AFP material and remove old AFP content from the Google News index. The eWeek article: Google to Drop AFP from News Index, provides more details. If you would like to read the complaint filed with the U.S. District Court in DC, we've posted it here.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:17 PM | Permalink

March 21, 2005

Full Text Court Filings: Agence France Press v. Google

Last Friday, news broke of Agence France Press filing suit against Google in U.S.District Court alleging copyright infringement. Here's the SEW Blog post with links to a Reuters and AFP's own story about the lawsuit.

If you're interested in reading the actual court filings (to this point), here's the full text of AFP's complaint (filed 3/17/2005) along with the 5 exhibits referenced in the document. All documents are PDF files.

Main Document (Complaint) 19 pages Exhibit A1 12 pages Exhibit A2 8 pages Exhibit A3 9 pages Exhibit 4 10 pages Exhibit B 6 pages

Posted by Gary Price at 5:54 PM | Permalink

March 19, 2005

Agence France Presse Sues Google over News Content

Yes, it's another lawsuit that the Google's lawyers will need to handle. This one was filed by Agence France Press (AFP) (a global news agency that supplies material to many news sites) in U.S. District Court on Thursday.

AFP is suing Google for "at least $17.5 million" and "an order barring Google News from displaying AFP photographs, news headlines or story leads..." A Reuters article also says that AFP has asked Google to "cease and desist" from using its content but "Google has ignored such requests and as of the filing date of the lawsuit 'continues in an unabated manner to violate AFP's copyrights.'"

More in the articles: + Agence France Presse sues Google over news site from Reuters + Here's how AFP is covering the story via their approved feed from Yahoo News.

Posted by Gary Price at 11:26 AM | Permalink

March 10, 2005

Now You Can Customize Google News

Google has just rolled out some new features that allow you to add, delete or re-arrange content on the Google News home page. Not a sports fan? Nuke the sports section from your page. Have a yen for Japanese entertainment? Go ahead and add that section, and increase or decrease the number of headlines you see while you're at it. These enhancements make an already useful news source even better.

Today's SearchDay article, New Customization, Personalization Features at Google News, describes the new features, which Google plans to officially announce on Thursday.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 12:21 AM | Permalink

March 4, 2005

Google News China Blocked...Again

Interfax reports that Google News China was unavailable after trying to access from various locations throughout China. The article goes on to mention that one of Google's English language news sites was often inaccessible.

This recent block on Google's Chinese language news service most likely has to do with a number of high level central government events taking place this week.

Posted by Gary Price at 9:01 AM | Permalink

February 1, 2005

Your Press Release Point Was???

The point of a press release is to let the world -- and in particular the media -- know something new that your company has done. In contrast, this press release Gary spotted does nothing of the sort. From an SEM firm, it's more a news article about Google's support of the nofollow attribute that any announcement about the company. Nice article -- but press release? No.

It's just another sign on how press releases, as I've written before, have become a trusted feed for Google News. Do a search for google at Google News and what do you get? This "press release" coming up to in the news results. It also does well for a query on search engine marketing, which ought to please the firm that put it out, given they make ample use of links within the release to describe themselves with those words.

The firm's not doing anything wrong, by the way. They can put out whatever they want as a press release, and plenty of other firms make use of them now purely as Google fodder. The fault lies with Google. It's come under fire for carrying press releases within its news service in the past, a problem that was largely solved by specially labeling press releases as such.

Now that more and more press releases aren't really releasing anything, it's overdue for another look at how the service carries this material. The same is true of Yahoo and other services that allow press releases to be injected into their systems. In the meantime, here's a post about another recent absurd press release, which in term links to more.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 2:35 PM | Permalink

January 17, 2005

Revisiting Google Censorship In Germany & France

Google Blogoscope updates sites previously identified as censored by Google in Germany and France in its Sites Google Censors post. You can see how many pages are shown in Google.com then compare to what's isn't showing at Google Germany or Google France.

The sites are all removed due to national laws in those countries, I believe. Google Blogoscope asks for Google to tell people when material has been removed, in the way they do for copyright reasons. John Battelle and I both asked for the same thing, in the past.

For John's views, check out Google News And China. From me, Got To Censor Search Listings? Why Not Disclose? explains how Google disclosure of copyright-driven removals in the US works, how no disclosure of spam removals is noted and how Google and all search engines have removed material for various reasons and should come up with a way to identify this. My China Blocks Google News -- So Bring On The Disclosure also coves the issue.

By the way, my usual refrain for "Google problems" like these is that they are often "search problems" and so people should also ask what's the situation with Yahoo, MSN and so on. But in this case, it really does look like a Google problem.

I went to Yahoo Germany and Yahoo France and compared to the main Yahoo site, doing some spot checking of how they handle domains where Google has censored. In five checks, I found no or very little differences in the counts that came back -- differences so minor that they likely have to do with factors other than censorship.

Is Google overzealous? Maybe. Or it could be that like too many people, national governments also assume that it's an all-Google world and send censorship requests to Google while overlooking other players like Yahoo.

The exact situation is uncertain because we don't really know how the sites came to be removed from Google. The 2002 Harvard study Localized Google search result exclusions assembled a list of sites heard about, reported about in a few cases and guessed at in others. A follow-up article Censorship of the Internet listed sites working from the Harvard list. Google Blogscope's post was inspired by that follow-up.

In all cases, they give a glimpse into censorship but not the complete picture of all pages removed, nor how and why.

Postscript: Also see Seth Finkelstein's long-standing Google Censorship - How It Works page for a look at how Google has implemented censorship on a country-by-country basis in the past.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:06 AM | Permalink

January 4, 2005

Press Releases Google's Trusted Feed?

Over in our forums, the Positioning by Press Release thread is worth checking out. Though brief at the moment, it touches on how Google News has almost become like a trusted feed service into Google, for those who know how to play the press release game.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:18 AM | Permalink

December 10, 2004

Newsknife Names Top News Sites for 2004

Newsknife, a site that ranks the 4,500 sites crawled by Google News for relevance and quality, has released its list of the top online news sites for 2004. The winners are:

1 The New York Times 2 Reuters 3 The Washington Post 4 ABC News 5 Xinhua, China 6 The Christian Science Monitor 7 Voice of America 8 CNN 9 Bloomberg 10 San Francisco Chronicle 11 Guardian Unlimited, UK 12 International Herald Tribune

Want to know more about how Newsknife analyzes news and compiles its rankings? See this SearchDay story, Ranking the Quality of Online News, for more details.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 6:54 PM | Permalink

More "Local" Versions of Google News Available

The other day we mentioned that a French language version of Google News Canada had just launched. Today, the Google Blog lets us know about six more local versions:

+ Argentina + Chile + Mexico + Austria + Switzerland (French) + Switzerland (German)

Posted by Gary Price at 8:45 AM | Permalink

December 8, 2004

French Version of Google News Canada Now Online

The Globe and Mail alerts us to the fact that Google launched a French language version of Google News Canada today.

The French interface of Google News Canada offers a news search and links to French news articles and related photos from all over the world, including sources from Quebec, France and Switzerland.

Posted by Gary Price at 5:33 PM | Permalink

December 7, 2004

Google News Developer Comments on Bias

Searchblog alerts us to an interview with Google News developer Krishna Bharat. The article focuses on bias concerns some have raised about Google News in various articles including this OJR story. Chris shares his thoughts in the SearchDay article: Is Google News Biased?

I agree with both Chris and JB, since humans program the database and make decision about what sources to crawl, some bias comes into play. However, the good news is that plenty of other excellent news search and browse tools exist.

Posted by Gary Price at 9:32 AM | Permalink

December 1, 2004

China Blocks Google News -- So Bring On The Disclosure

China's Google Block Sparks Media Group's Protest from InternetNews.com (spotted via Search Engine Guide) brings confirmation from Google that China is indeed blocking non-Chinese versions of its Google News service.

This comes after Google omitted content from the Chinese language version of Google News saying it was in the best interest of Chinese users, since they wouldn't be able to reach some sources due to China's own blocking.

Reporters Without Borders slams both China for doing the blocking and Google for doing filtering on the Chinese edition of its service. The group has previously criticized Google competitor Yahoo for filtering and more recently complained about practices by both companies.

Google denies that it is filtering any web content. Any blocks are put on by China itself. And in once recent example I examined, what someone assumed was censorship looked to me to be just a misunderstanding of how Google works. More here: More Chinese Censorship At Google? I Think Not.

Google, like other companies, has to follow the laws of the countries where it operates in. That's why it is forced to filter content in places like France, Germany and the United States -- something that attracts nowhere near the attention and outrage that actions in China generate.

In the US, Google at least partially discloses when material has been omitted, as I covered here: Got To Censor Search Listings? Why Not Disclose? But material removed voluntarily, such as for spamming reasons, isn't disclosed.

It seems well overdue for Google to do two things.

First, if China isn't forcing Google to omit material, then stop the voluntary dropping of some news sources. So what if Chinese users can't actually reach them? At least you can disclose in the results that they may not be able to reach some sources due to the Chinese government's actions, which raises awareness.

Second, Google (and all search engines) should provide disclosure in some way of all material that's been removed, whether forced to for legal reasons or through voluntary actions. That would go a long way to building trust with searchers.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:23 AM | Permalink

November 29, 2004

Is Google News (English Version) Being Blocked in China?

Interfax is reporting that the English version of Google's news service has been inaccessible in China for more than a week.

Zhang Junwei, a Google Media official stationed in Beijing, acknowledged that the company's English News channel was inaccessible when contacted by Interfax, but could not provide further comment.

The Google English News channel, which monitors more than 4,500 online news outlets, has become a popular resource for Chinese netizens searching for information from around the world. As Interfax previously reported, the Chinese government blocked Google's News channel in September of 2002.

Posted by Gary Price at 6:53 AM | Permalink

September 29, 2004

Google News In Beta To Avoid Ad Lawsuits?

Nice article spotted via Dave Winer, Google News: Beta Not Make Money from Wired. The article theorizes that Google has kept the "beta" moniker on Google News for so long because it's afraid that removing it -- and adding ads -- would cause it to be subject to copyright lawsuits.

Maybe. But the same argument about lifting headlines and lead paragraphs is already applicable to the long-standing Google web search service. No one I know of has seriously sued Google over that.

The reason, of course, is that people want to be listed in Google's web search -- to the degree that they get upset over lost business if there's any major algorithm change, as happened big time last December (see my What Happened To My Site On Google? article).

Given that Google News drives traffic to many publisher web sites (some of which like the New York Times earn off Google's contextual ads program), biting the traffic hand that feeds them seems unlikely to me.

In fact, the New York Times makes another good example, given that the publisher has specifically worked with Google to be accessible in Google News despite its password-protection on some stories.

Still, the two key points remain. Isn't well past time for Google News to come out of beta and when will ads finally appear? I'll let you know what I hear.

By the way, I see hardly any ads at Yahoo News -- a banner here and there and no sponsored listings that I can find. In addition, a keyword search at Yahoo News such as for movies or world series doesn't bring up any sponsored listings, in contrast to the case with regular web searching.

It suggests that if Google has some reason not to monetize Google News, the same reasons may also be happening with Yahoo News -- which in terms of keyword-driven searches, is as automated as Google. For more on that, see: Postscript On Google News & Bias.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 28, 2004

Google Responds to China News Censorship Story

Last week we linked to a New Scientist report about Google omitting some controversial "sources" in their Google News China crawl.

In a new post on the Google Blog the company shares their viewpoint.

For last week's launch of the Chinese-language edition of Google News, we had to decide whether sources that cannot be viewed in China should be included for Google News users inside the PRC. Naturally, we want to present as broad a range of news sources as possible. For every edition of Google News, in every language, we attempt to select news sources without regard to political viewpoint or ideology. For Internet users in China, we had to consider the fact that some sources are entirely blocked. Leaving aside the politics, that presents us with a serious user experience problem...We also considered the amount of information that would be omitted. In this case it is less than two percent of Chinese news sources.

Posted by Gary Price at 6:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 27, 2004

Postscript On Google News & Bias

Last week, JD Lasica wrote about a possible bias with Google News, as Gary recapped here: Does Google News Have A Conservative Bias? I sent JD some of my thoughts after the article came out.

I explained that Yahoo News is less human-powered when it comes to keyword-based news search than you might think and that Yahoo's ranking algorithm, by favoring content actually hosted by Yahoo, may make searches at Yahoo News more mainstream in nature. Those comments are part of a postscript he's now put up: More on Google News and Yahoo News.

Among additional thoughts from others: Bush's nicknames like "Dubya" or "Shrub" may mean critical articles about him show up more for those, rather than his actual name and an allegation that Google is responding to behind-the-scenes manipulation by right-wing groups (odd, given that if the company has any leaning, it's definitely toward the left).

Chris Sherman also takes a look at the issue in today's SearchDay: Is Google News Biased?

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our forum thread: Does Google News have a Conservative Bias?

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 6:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 23, 2004

Does Google News Have A Conservative Bias?

JD Lasica takes a look political coverage at Google News and Yahoo News in Balancing Act: How News Portals Serve Up Political Stories from the Online Journalism Review.

>From the article, "Google News uses computer algorithms to identify top stories while Yahoo News favors old-fashioned human editors. But do Google's automated search results display a conservative bias?"

A good "behind the scenes" read.

On Tuesday, New Scientist reports that Google News China omits controversial material .

On Monday, PC World's Harry McCracken recently posted about issues he's found with Google News.

In August, Vin Crosbie released a report about Google News. He wrote, "Although Google spiders more than 4,500 news sources, only about dozen account for the vast majority of stories on Google News. And two of those dozen predominant sources are owned and operated by the U.S. and Chinese governments."

On a related note: Another resource, Topix.net (not mentioned in the story) offers more than 150,000 topic oriented pages pages built by machine from a crawl of more than 7000 source. They also offer an explanation about how pages are built using their NewsRank technology.

I'm betting that Rick Skrenta (CEO of Topix) and Greg Linden (CEO of Findory) will have some comments about the OJR article.

Want to comment or discuss this topic? Please visit our forum thread: News Search & Biases.

Posted by Gary Price at 8:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 21, 2004

Controversial News Stories on Google News China

Google omits controversial news stories in China Source: New Scientist

>From the article, "Researchers at Dynamic Internet Technology (DIT), a US company that provides technology for circumventing internet restrictions in China, have discovered that the recently-launched Chinese version of Google News omits blocked news sources from its results...Google admits to omitting some news sources within China but says this is meant to improve the quality of the service...Bill Xia, chief executive of DIT, however, accuses Google of reinforcing Chinese internet restrictions by leaving some sites off its list. 'When people do a search they will get the wrong impression that the whole world is saying the same thing,' he told New Scientist."

Posted by Gary Price at 6:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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