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

January 4, 2007

MSN's Live Search News giveth and AOL News taketh away

At some point during the holidays, MSN's Live Search News started to include press releases in its results. At roughly the same time, AOL News stopped including press releases in its results.

Of course, the first news search engine to treat press release distribution services as "news sources" was Google News, back in September 2002. Yahoo! News started including press releases in its results in March 2004. And press releases are mixed in with the results at Ask.com News Search and Topix.net.

According to a report from Outsell, press releases have become the top news source of knowledge workers. Outsell called this an “eye-popping shift in most-used information types.” Only 10% of knowledge workers in the corporate sector used press releases as news sources from September 2004 to January 2005. This changed dramatically from November 2005 to February 2006, when Outsell found 37% of knowledge workers using press releases as news sources.

Press releases leapfrogged over trade publications to become the top news source of knowledge workers. Roger Strouse, Outsell Vice President and Lead Analyst, has offered several possible explanations for the rising popularity of press releases. “It may be that press releases are easier for people to get their hands on,” he told InformationWeek last year. “It may be that press releases are shorter and pithier,” he added.

It will be interesting to see if this trend accelerates or decelerates this year -- with MSN's Live Search News adding press releases to its results, while AOL News is deleting them.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 9:32 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 25, 2006

Microsoft Removes Belgian Content Without Court Order

The Register writes Microsoft dodges court in Belgian copyright battle where they say Microsoft decided not to go to court over Belgian newspapers request for them to remove their content from their index. Google was ordered to remove the content by a Belgian court and then later lost an appeal on the same case. Microsoft simply did not want to fight them and decided to just grant the wishes of the cease and desist letter sent to them.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:08 AM | Permalink

October 17, 2006

MSN Belgium Drops Some Newspapers, Negotiating On Inclusion After Cease & Desist

Earlier, we touched on the fact that Copiepresse was threatening to go after MSN for carrying Belgian newspapers in the way it went after Google. Via PaidContent.org, Update: MSN is latest target of Belgian copyright complaint from InfoWorld covers how Copiepresse is now negotiating with MSN Belgium after sending a cease-and-desist letter to MSN. Copiepresse hopes to gain a share of advertising revenue.

Meanwhile, MSN Belgium has removed some newspapers. Removed from where isn't clear. MSN Belgium does have a dedicated news area, so it might be from there. However, sites may also have been removed from web search results similar to what Google did. I tried a search for site:lesoir.be, and the main news site seems to have been removed.

InfoWorld also notes:

The group, which represents some of Belgium's best known newspapers, including Le Soir and Le Libre, has been gathering more support for its cause. It was joined this week by separate groups that represent Belgian photographers, journalists, scientific authors and multimedia publishers, who plan to back its efforts.

It will be interesting to see how many more groups they rally in support against the search engines, and how the search engines react. I think there's a big difference between search engines deciding they might pay to include relatively small amounts of content in specialized news search engines versus a frankly insane idea that they're going to negotiate deals for inclusion in regular web search results.

Ultimately, the good people of Belgium might mind themselves without the ability to search the web, should Copiepresse succeed in its quest that getting permission via robots.txt should be illegal.

I've have much more to say on this subject -- I'm working on a piece I hope to post later this week. For some related material from me, see:

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:56 AM | Permalink

August 1, 2006

MSN Assigns Names To Vertical Search Crawlers

I covered news at my blog this morning that MSN has assigned names to all their robots or crawlers. When MSN Search first launched, they had one robot named, msnbot. MSNbot did the work of all, from normal web search to image search to news and images. Now, MSN has clarified the roles and assigned names to each robot.

The MSN Shopping bot is msnbot-products, the MSN News bot is msnbot-news, the MSN Image Search bot is msnbot-media and the MSN Search bot is still msnbot. This is important for SEOs, now you can define in your robots.txt file if you want msnbot-media to index your images or not.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:53 AM | Permalink

June 9, 2006

MSN Windows Live Launches News & Local Live Answers

The MSN Search blog announced that MSN Search now supports news specific and local specific "live answers." What that means is if you do a search on something news related like, george bush at live.com, you will get news related results at the top. Same deal with local specific searches such as, edison, nj dentist. Google, Yahoo and Ask.com all have this type of feature.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 11:25 AM | Permalink

May 16, 2006

MSNBC.com News Search Powered By Windows Live

The MSN Search Blog noted last night that MSNBC.com is now powered by Windows Live Search. If you perform a search at MSNBC.com, such as on pentagon you will notice that it divides the "most recent" and "full search." The MSN Search team explained that the implementation of this new search feature was "pretty simple" for them to get up and running.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:29 AM | Permalink

January 19, 2005

MSN Releases Australian and Canadian Versions of Newsbot

New from MSN today are a few more local versions of their Newsbot news search beta. Online today: + Newsbot Australia + Newsbot Canada + Newsbot Canada (French) You can find a listing with all of the local versions of Newsbot here. What is Newsbot all about? Take a look at the SearchDay article: MSN Previews Personalized News Search.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:50 PM | Permalink

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