November 6, 2009

PRSA 2009 International Conference Features Two Online Marketing Heroes

I'll by flying to San Diego this weekend to speak at the PRSA 2009 International Conference next week. Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank Online Marketing and a member of the SES Advisory Board, will also be speaking at the annual Public Relations Society of America event.

Odden is speaking on Monday, November 9, at 10:15 a.m. about "Help Google Find Your Releases: Top 10 Search Engine Optimization Tactics for Public Relations Professionals."

Nine out of 10 journalists, reporters and editors use search engines to do their jobs, according to a recent survey by TopRank Online Marketing. In this environment, public relations professionals must understand the ins and outs of search engine optimization (SEO).

So, Odden will help PR people find out how to choose the best key words, optimize their newsroom and press releases, build better links, and sell SEO to decision makers. Plus, he'll share "the No. 1 SEO tactic to implement today."

I'll be speaking on Tuesday, November 10, at 11:15 a.m. with Laura Sturaitis, the senior vice president, media and product services, at Business Wire.

How do you know your press release delivers value? Are there ways to increase a press releases' ROI?

Sturaitis and I will discuss real live examples and techniques to get the most mileage for press releases, especially in the Web 2.0 world. We'll explain why PR people need to work hand-in-hand with their Web team to see how visitors are getting to their site and moving through it. We'll also examine Web analytics for compiling, tracking and measuring activity deriving from the press release via the wires and elsewhere.

If you want a preview, check out my post on the ComPRrehension blog, which is entitled, "Does Your Press Release Deliver Value?"

Odden and I also spoke last year at the PRSA 2008 International Conference in Detroit. Why is this useful information for search engine optimizers to share with their colleagues down the hall in the public relations department? SEO specialists and PR specialists need to work together to handle the opportunities and threats created by Google universal search.

When Google announced universal search in May 2007, Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience at Google, said, "The ultimate goal of universal search is to break down the silos of information that exist on the web and provide the very best answer every time a user enters a query."

This radically changed everything we knew about search engine optimization (SEO) and public relations (PR). If your webmaster isn't optimizing content for YouTube, Google News, or Google Images, then who is?

With more than 12.8 billion expanded search queries a month on Google Sites in the U.S., this isn't a rhetorical question. In other words, the SEO specialists and PR specialists need to get out of their silos to ensure that their organization is getting found in all the right places.

As I told Michael Miller, the author of "Online Marketing Heroes: Interviews with 25 Successful Online Marketing Gurus," back in 2008, "For a good part of the 20th century, every part of the marketing mix was in a different silo. Advertising had its lingo and its metrics, and PR had its lingo and its metrics, and if you had a group that was focused on trade shows and events, they had their lingo and their metrics, etcetera. One of the things that is sort of a byproduct of keeping people in their silos is that things that the email marketing people learned ten years ago, or the search engine marketing people earned five years ago, the PR people in the same organization haven't learned yet. As a result, they keep doing what used to work but stopped working a long time ago, only nobody noticed."

I added, "To the extent that you can get the PR people interacting with the search people, they will discover that there are lots of things they can do together."

And Odden was also interviewed for Miller's book. So, your PR people will be getting the same advice no matter which online marketing guru they listen to at the PRSA 2009 International Conference -- or which chapter of Miller's book they read.

Odden and I both spoke at SES London 2008. Check out my video interview with him below.

Lee Odden, TopRank Online Marketing, at SES London 2008

And Odden and I are both speaking at SES Chicago 2009. So, there's no escaping our combined message: Get out of your silo; start interacting with other members of your marketing team.

Get it? Got it? Good.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 3:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

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 (12)

September 15, 2009

Australian Newspaper Publishers: Search Engines Break Into Homes, Steal Content

Newspaper publishers are reaching such new lows with their arguments against search engines, I wonder how they stay in business at all. I mean, doesn't journalism require gathering facts and analyzing them?

The latest low is an Australian newspaper publisher who says that search engines indexing newspaper sites is essentially breaking and entering.

WRONG.

If anything, your newspaper is like a dance club, and you can deny entrance to the search engines if they're not dressed up enough for your taste. Just slap some no index code on your robots.txt file and it's like hiring the best bouncer in town.

Because, let's face it, you want eyeballs at your website. Otherwise, why have one? People find a ton of content through search, but if you're not liking the engines, just block them. Simple as pie.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 2:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

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)

August 6, 2008

New News Search Engine: Newsflashr

Newsflashr.com launched a new type of search engine for news stories today. Users are prompted to enter keywords and the search results are polled and displayed in real-time from many of the leading news services such as MSN Live, Ask Big News, Google News, Yahoo News, MSNBC, Digg and Twitter to name a few.

Newsflashr will also feature the Techmeme Leaderboard.

The site is the first to add a social twist to news reporting, in an attempt to leverage contributions of citizen journalists and the collective intelligence. For the first time, we'll be able to determine whether Twitter is actually a news source. Plus, Digg - one of the key drivers of searches on Google Hot Trends - will be featured as a news source.

The sites is shooting for a hip, ironic image. The front page graphic is no Google Doodle. It's a pic of The Joker superimposed on nuclear missiles, with the caption the Joker's line from The Dark Knight, "Why so serious?" (see below)

"As a small company, we think that we can challenge the big guns with our new approach that pulls from all their results and pushes them on to a single results page. Say someone is really thirsty for any news updates on a given person or company, using Newsflashr, they'll never miss a beat," said Gal Arav, founder of Newsflashr.com, in a statement.

The new service complements Newsflashr's existing free news portal launched in February 2008. The existing portal is a news interface that highlights keywords (topics) representing the "collective intelligence" of hundreds of the top news editors as it updates throughout the day for a wide variety of mainstream news and blog categories.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 1, 2008

SEW Experts: Newspapers Bleed Red Ink: Death by Internet

Journalists are a dying breed. Newspapers face death by Internet. In today's Search Engine WarGames column, "Newspapers Bleed Red Ink: Death by Internet," Kevin Heisler suggests that it's time to rethink journalism as a career choice.

» Full story

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 13, 2008

CNN.com Beats Google in News Video Search

A year after launching a comprehensive search offering, CNN.com beat out Google when it comes to searching for news, according to a survey conducted by ROI Research for DoubleClick. 57% of the 500 participants surveyed said they search CNN.com for news while 53% say they search Google. Here are the top ten sites, with the percentage of participants who use them for news search:

1. CNN - 57%
2. Google - 53%
3. MSNBC - 41%
4. Yahoo - 40%
5. MSN.com - 31%
6. Foxnews.com - 25%
7. YouTube - 22%
8. Google News - 18%
9. Aol.com - 15%
10. Google Video - 14%

And just how successful are those searches?

• One-third of respondents find a relevant news video for their specific query on their first search Almost/Every time.
• One-third of respondents find the most up-to-date news video for their specific query on their first search Almost/Every time.

When video pops up in a search result for a news story...

• 36% of respondents are Very Likely to click on a video that is listed on a search engine results page while searching for a news story.
• 35% of respondents are Very Likely to watch a news video that is embedded in a news article that they are reading.

Would participants like to see more or less video in their news search?

• 33% agree or strongly agree that they would like to see more video in search results
• 47% are neutral
• 20% disagree or strongly disagree

How much online video news are participants consuming?

• 51% watch 1 hour or less per week
• 49% watch 1 hour or more per week

When it comes to local news, 79% of respondents use Search. Here's how they query:

• 42% use a local news station name in their search query
• 31% use a city name in a query
• 17% use a zip code
• 12% don't search any differently
• 21% don't use search to find local news

If you liked these numbers, then check out the following: PR News survey finds online video is underutilized AP, Microsoft Joint Venture Video Platform

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 9:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

April 9, 2008

USA Today Launches Message-Based Application

While many newspapers struggle to adapt to the web, USA Today is proving that they are one of the ones who get it. Today, the McLean, VA-based newspaper announced a new message-based application that allows users to receive IM updates of stories that interest them.

Initially available on AIM, all users have to do is add "USA TODAY" as a buddy and insert keywords into the dialogue box to receive messages about stories related to those keywords. The message will contain a brief summary with a link to the article. The application was developed by InfiniteAgent, a provider of instant messaging and SMS logging services.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 11:53 AM | Permalink

February 27, 2008

Google News UK Sorting News Without Bias?

Can the flap of a butterfly's wings in the Googleplex set off a tornado in the top UK news and media sites? In today's SearchDay, "Stop Press 2: Hitwise Data Shows Google News UK Unbiased," Greg Jarboe looks at some Hitwise UK data showing that Google News is getting more traffic from Google UK, but it's also sending more traffic to other sites, including competitive news aggregators.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 2:44 PM | Permalink

February 11, 2008

CNN Wants News Mojo From the People

CNN wants news mojo from the people -- and will soon launch iReport.com for citizen journalists.

News sharing is a natural next step, because people already send far more videos and images than CNN could ever show online or on air. According to MediaWeek, CNN uses only 10 percent of all contributions through its current iReport functionality.

Today when you upload video to the CNN site, your content is thoroughly vetted. With this News “You Tube” service, both terrific and terrible videos will get shared there.

Susan Grant, EVP of CNN News Services, welcomes all the noise. CNN will allow all content to be shared, but remove objectionable items when they feel it's necessary.

Unfortunately, CNN won't get the most mojo! They decided to launch a new iReport destination, and even spent $750k to secure two domain names. There could be many reasons for doing this, but traffic didn't enter into this decision.

From a search marketing perspective, it's baffling that CNN isn't able to leverage their brand, authority, link love and traffic within the mother domain. My sympathies are extended to CNN's online marketers and techies, who are figuring out all possible ways to optimize this new destination. It's a lot more work.

To me, it would be far better if CNN tried to create a nice, big searchable world of professional and user-generated news content. If CNN really wants mojo, then they should open up directly to people -- at least on a branded CNN sub-domain. Take a calculated risk here.

Posted by at 10:40 PM | Permalink

November 14, 2007

Using Google Trends to target cities with press releases

Mike Cheslar of eVisibility Insider has figured out a simple yet clever strategy to make sure that your press releases are seen by cities and regions that are looking for your specific keywords. Check out his post to see how he combines Google Trends and the MSA field in PRWeb.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 8:33 AM | Permalink

October 16, 2007

Search and Politics: Made for Each Other?

Search engines are playing an increasingly important role in the education of voters in the U.S. And according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, there is a statistically significant correlation between using the Internet to get political news and information and the actual act of voting.

In today's SearchDay, "Search About to Upset the Political Applecart," Greg Jarboe examines data from Pew that shows press release optimization for news search engines may be three times more valuable to presidential campaigns than website optimization for web search engines.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 2:33 PM | Permalink

September 13, 2007

Popcorn Search Disappoints

The popcorn lung news has been water-cooler talk around here recently. In case you haven't heard, it can be unsafe to consume vast quantities of microwaved, buttered popcorn. Of course, I wanted to learn more and entered “popcorn” as my search term. The results were not particularly interesting or relevant to me.

All the engines returned similar things about the edible treat from sites like Wikipedia, the Popcorn Board, Factmonster, and retailers of all stripes. A product called Roxio Popcorn also made the grade, which helps you copy DVDs.

Google did produce two relevant results in positions 7/8, from The Pump Handle and Scientific American. There were none returned from Yahoo, Ask or MSN. Yahoo suggested “popcorn lung” for searching, while none of the others made relevant suggestions. In the paid column, Revolution Health bought ads which linked to its Reuters story about popcorn lung.

Why can't a popcorn search reflect our collective interests better? We know this specific interest may be short-lived, but there's been a lot of news coverage. Thus it's disappointing that nothing much is shown -- unless you consciously think about adding keywords to popcorn.

The next time someone says that search and semantic approaches work perfectly well? Just offer this example to them. Fortunately, there are technologies that either personalize or share community interests, so we won't be disappointed forever.

Posted by at 2:21 AM | Permalink

August 29, 2007

Google Dominates SES News

If you evaluate the news stories and blog posts about Search Engine Strategies, then "universal search" beat "click fraud" as the top story to come out of the conference. If you analyze all the news coverage of SES San Jose, then Wednesday's keynote speaker Marissa Mayer beat Tuesday's keynote speaker Jim Lanzone as the top newsmaker at the event.

Greg Jarboe takes a look at some of the trends spotted via news search in today's SearchDay, "News Search Analysis: SES San Jose."

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 11:16 PM | Permalink

August 19, 2007

Journalists use search to research companies and trends

According to a new survey of survey of over 1,100 journalists, search engines remain the top ranked means for researching companies and trends. While Fusion PR won't publish the survey results and analysis on its Fusion Forum blog until September 10, 2007, the firm did issue a press release about the results. Among the other findings in the survey, 78% of technology journalists read blogs, 67% cite blogs in their articles, and 35% maintain their own blog.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 7:08 PM | Permalink

July 29, 2007

Sun Microsystems to release news first on the Web

Sun Microsystems says it will start to release important corporate news first over the Internet, in what is thought to be the first time a US company will use the Web as its main channel for sensitive information. According to the Financial Times, the move could point to a day when companies stop issuing press releases.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 10:43 AM | Permalink

June 22, 2007

Getting Ranked on News Search Engines Is Getting More Difficult

There was a time when simply optimizing your press release with the right keywords and links got you top ranking on news search engines. As more public relations pros caught on and learned some elements of SEO, and as more SEOs learned to promote press releases, the SERPs got a bit more crowded at the top. Now, the offline media companies are getting involved, so TV, radio and newspapers are competing for the top spots in news search as well.

What this means for SEOs doing PR work is that the free ride is over.

In The Crowded World of Press Release SEO, Greg Jarboe reports from the Public Relations Society of America's T3 PR Conference with the details.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 11:14 AM | 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 3, 2007

E-consultancy publishes online PR briefing

E-consultancy has just published an Online PR Briefing. You can download the 12-page report for free. It includes a summary of a recent roundtable discussion on this topic, plus other information about market trends, search statistics and useful resources.

Katy Howell of immediate future, who spoke at Search Engine Strategies in London back in February, provides a useful overview of where Online PR is in 2007. There is also a debate about the similarities and differences between Online PR and Search Engine Optimization. If you are interested in the crossover between these marketing disciplines, you should also read the blog post by Ken McGaffin of Wordtracker.com.

It is clear from the roundtable discussion that there are still plenty of organizations struggling to grasp how Online PR fits into the bigger picture. One of the reasons for this is that is hard to know which department or agency should own it. Is it part of online marketing or is it something which traditional PR agencies should be doing as part of their job? Part of the issue seems to be that Online PR covers a range of areas from "defensive" reputation monitoring to proactive attempts to drive website traffic which can deliver a clear ROI.

There is plenty more about this in the briefing, including some new statistics about corporate blogs. According to the E-Consultancy Customer Engagement Report, published in November 2006, 35% of companies are planning to use corporate blogs in the next 12 months, and 17% are using them already.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 8:36 AM | Permalink

March 28, 2007

Online users finish more stories than print readers

According to the Poynter Institute's Eyetrack study released today at the American Society of Newspaper Editors conference, online readers finish news stories more often than those who read in print. When readers chose to read an online story, they usually read an average of 77% of the story, compared to 62% in broadsheets and 57% in tabloids.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 7:56 PM | Permalink

March 14, 2007

Topix.net buys .com domain, worries about Google rankings

Kevin Delaney of The Wall Street Journal Online reports that Topix.net, the news search site owned by Gannett, McClatchy and Tribune, has bought its .com domain after paying a Canadian company $1 million. About 50% of the visits to Topix come from search engines, and about 90% of that comes from Google. So, Topix plans to run its site at both Topix.net and Topix.com for awhile, in order to get over any unpredictabilities in Google and other search engine results.

Over at WebProNews, Andy Beal says Topix should have saved themselves the $1 million. Writes Beal, "I'm not going to dive into a how-to on 301 redirects ... but do want to look at the bigger picture. Why in the world would you change your domain name anyway?"

Good question. And Rafat Ali of paidContent.org asked Chris Tolles, the VP of marketing for Topix, for an answer. In an e-mail, Tolles told Ali that the big benefit of this change is in the brand...."most of our first year's traffic came in through SEO, while an increasingly large portion is coming in direct, and we think the .com will go a long way in user acquisition, especially around word of mouth and offline promotion.”

If you want to weigh in on the growing debate, head over to the SEW forums.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 7:51 AM | Permalink

March 12, 2007

Will MySpace launch social news search?

According to Terry Heaton's PoMo Blog, MySpace plans to get into the social news search business with a launch sometime early in the second quarter. According to inside sources and the company's own sales materials, MySpace News will aggregate real-time news and blogs from top sites around the Web. In addition, it will allow users to "rate and comment on every news item that comes through the system" and "submit stories they think are cool and even author pieces from their MySpace blog." Head over to the SEW forums if you think SMOs will Digg this news?

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 9:02 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

January 29, 2007

Tribune taps news search engine Topix for classified ads

Mark Walsh of MediaPost Publications reports that news search engine "Topix.net has forged a deal to power general merchandise classifieds on Tribune Company newspaper Web sites, starting with baltimoresun.com and extending to 11 others by May." Under the partnership, Topix and Tribune Interactive will create co-branded classified pages for the 12 newspaper sites where consumers can upload merchandise ads and photos for free.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 11:19 AM | Permalink

57% of teachers use Internet-based news in the classroom

Robert MacMillan of Reuters reports on a new study by the Carnegie-Knight Task Force on the Future of Journalism Education. The study found that 57% of teachers use Internet-based news in the classroom with some frequency, compared with 31% for national television news, 28% for daily newspapers, and only 13% for local television news. One of the 1,262 teachers in grades 5 through 12 who were surveyed in the fall of 2006 was quoted as saying, "Students do not relate to newspapers at all, any more than they would to vinyl records."

According to Journalism.org, after several years of tight competition at top, "Yahoo News pulled away some from the pack among news websites in traffic in 2006." The "Big Four" include two news search engines: Yahoo News and AOL News.

According to year-end figures from comScore Media Metrix, Yahoo News averaged 31.4 million unique visitors a month in 2006. Second place MSNBC had 25.9 million, followed by CNN (21.3 million) and AOL News (21 million).

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 11:08 AM | Permalink

January 15, 2007

Findory Set to Coast to a Halt

Findory CEO & founder Greg Linden announced Sunday that he is abandoning Findory. After looking around in vain for a plan for the news aggregator/search/social network that would help him retain his passion, Linden has decided to let the site coast to a halt instead.

"I am moving on now, not to a new venture, but to spend more time on health and with family. Development on Findory now will slow to a crawl. There may be new features, but they will be rare. I no longer will spend time exploring funding, biz dev deals, or recruiting. Findory appears to have sufficient resources to run on autopilot through most of 2007. Findory will eventually fade away, but I believe it has touched immortality through the impact it had."

Findory launched in 2004.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:52 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

January 5, 2007

Investor criticizes news aggregation site

While Michael Arrington, the blogger behind TechCrunch, invested in Daylife, a news aggregation Web site, that hasn't stopped him from critizing it.

Arrington says, "I am unhappy to report that I am underwhelmed by what Daylife has to offer. Perhaps I am conflicted because I am close to the company, but in my opinion Daylife has failed to raise the bar and will not be a compelling offering for news junkies."

Arrington says Daylife "is well designed," but he adds, "Daylife enters the market about a year after a slew of other competitors came out with their products. Gather.com, Inform.com, NewsVine and Topix all have competing products. Google News reigns over all of them."

Ouch!

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 11:25 AM | Permalink

December 22, 2006

Do top news stories drive top news searches?

The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press has just released an analysis of ongoing public opinion polls that identifies "What Was -- and Wasn't on the Public's Mind" in 2006.

If you compare Pew's list of the top 10 public opinion stories of 2006 with the lists of top searches in Google News, Yahoo News, AOL News, or any of the other news search engines compiled by Enid Burns of ClickZ Stats, you'll see that some things on the public's mind prompted news searches and some some apparently didn't.

For example, Pew identifies "deepening gloom about Iraq" as one of "the strongest 2006 trends in public opinion." And Iraq is in the list of top 10 news searches at Yahoo News, AOL News, Microsoft Live, Ask.com and Lycos for 2006. But, Iraq is missing from the list of top 10 searches in Google News for the year.

Pew also says, "Gas prices dominated the public's attention -- as long as they were on the upswing." And "gas prices" was the top new topic at AOL News, as well as one of the top news searches at Ask.com and Lycos in 2006. But it didn't make the top 10 lists for Google News, Yahoo News, or Microsoft Live.

So, do top news stories drive top news searches? On some news search engines, it appears they do. On others, the jury is still out.

Maybe they are just below the cut off for the top 10 list. Or maybe the users of some news search engines are more interested in "hard news," while the users of other news search engines are more interested in "celebrity gossip."

Or, maybe I should stop speculating and just admit that Danny Sullivan over at Search Engline Land is right: The top 10 lists reported by some of the search engines are "heavily filtered."

According to Occam's razor, "All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one."

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 10:32 AM | Permalink

December 20, 2006

MySpace creates "friends" for newspaper

Roy Greenslade of the Guardian Unlimited in the UK reports that a small newspaper in Scotland, the Fife Herald, set up its own MySpace page and recruited some 400 new "friends" within weeks. Adam Morris, one of the newspaper's staffers, notes: "It's a totally untapped market for local papers, and it opens up new lines of communication," especially among younger readers.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 10:40 AM | Permalink

December 19, 2006

Mixing user-submitted content and traditional content

Bambi Francisco of MarketWatch says, "Navel-gazers will be the stars in 2007."

Or, to put her cryptic headline into context, "Today, however perilous it may be, businesses are relying more on the audience, or the user -- to use the au courant term -- to tap into their self-absorbed, I-am-somebody, navel-gazing inclinations. Turn your readers into writers, is one of the mantras of Wikia, a wiki-hosting service."

Well, flaming your readers is one way to boost the number of comments on your blog, I guess.

But, if you can get past the provocative opening, her commentary is full of some interesting news nuggets, including this one: "About 30% of online news site Topix.net comes from user-generated or reader comments. That's expected to jump to about 50% next year, Topix.net's CEO Rich Skrenta tells me."

Now, you won't get an argument from me about that.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 11:10 AM | Permalink

December 13, 2006

Newsknife names top news sites of 2006

The folks at Newsknife have just announced the Top News Sites of 2006. Their list is compiled by analyzing a sample of 438,330 individual site listings at Google News by 4504 sites for 1768 news items during year.

The Top News Sites of 2006 are: 1 ABC News 2 New York Times 3 Reuters 4 Washington Post 5 Times Online, UK 6 Forbes 7 Guardian Unlimited, UK 8 Voice of America 9 Christian Science Monitor 10 International Herald Tribune 11 Bloomberg 12 CNN

This is the fifth year of Newsknife's "Top News Sites" ratings. And the big news in 2006 is how little the list of top sites has changed over the last three years. Are some news sites born to rule?

Neil Pharazyn, the Newsknife spokesperson, says, "Despite the belief that the internet is unleashing a wave of change, it appears that an aristocracy of news sites is settling in. It looks unlikely that newcomers will replace these sites soon as America's favorite news sources. And, many of these sites have print media associations. Maybe printed news will be around for a while too."

Now, that would be big news!

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 10:31 AM | Permalink

November 30, 2006

How The Digg Editorial Process Differs From Search Engine Editorial Process

Todd Malicoat has a write up called The Search Marketer's Guide to Digg, where he explains the difference between the Digg.com editorial process and search engines editorial process. It all comes down to the "human editorial authority," and I quote;

While most the search engines DO have human intervention - they haven't accepted and embraced it. One of the beauties of digg is if there is CRAP in the index - you know exactly who to blame for it.

As always, both human and algorithmic methods of intervention have their faults. I am sure Danny will go into a bigger write up on the pros and cons of each at a later point.

Postscript From Danny: I may write-up more on this in the future, and I talked about it on a recent Daily SearchCast episode. The short story is that it's been amazing to watch Digg effectively go through the same type of spam fighting evolution that the search engines have done.

Consider from Digg:

Digg is a user driven social content website. Ok, so what the heck does that mean? Well, everything on digg is submitted by the digg user community (that would be you). After you submit content, other digg users read your submission and digg what they like best. If your story rocks and receives enough diggs, it is promoted to the front page for the millions of digg visitors to see.

The overall idea is that the community does everything. In reality, there is a lot of backend editing and changes done by moderators. That's because the community, if left to itself, will have a small number of people who try to manipulate Digg for their own benefit.

It's an old story. Consider from Google:

PageRank performs an objective measurement of the importance of web pages by solving an equation of more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Instead of counting direct links, PageRank interprets a link from Page A to Page B as a vote for Page B by Page A. PageRank then assesses a page's importance by the number of votes it receives.

Except it's far more complicated than that. Links have to be weighted, not trusted and entire sites removed because of spam and manipulation.

Both Digg and Google (and the search engines before it) started out in what I'd call "trusted mode," where you are optimistic that a community (people submitting; a collection of pages) can be trusted. Along the way, they shift to "mistrust mode" where you realize you need to be initially dubious about everything that flows in.

If I had more time, I'd go through and do a long compare-and-contrast on how recent Digg changes have exact counterparts in the crawler-based search engine world. Honestly, there are times when I could do a search and replace for the word Google to the word Digg in an article on spam fighting and the description would be the same.

The answer, by the way, is simple. Machines that the search engines depend on are imperfect (in particular, rankings can be manipulated more broadly), as is the human model Digg uses (in particular, humans can miss a lot of things). The combination of the two is much stronger. Some more thoughts on this from me:

• More On Query Refinement, The Human Scale Problem & Creating The Search Dialog
• MSN's Hand Crafted Results (Fake? - Shame On Me!)
• In The Election Results Race, Yahoo's The Winner
• Case Study: Digg Versus Google News Traffic

And here are a bunch of related stories from across the web that we've included in our headlines recently:

• Banned From Digg, John Chow dot Com;
• Akismet, Could They Ban Kevin Rose?, Dave Naylor;
• Kevin Rose & Digg on Moderation*, Google Blogoscoped;
• Kevin Rose Admitting Digg Has Moderators, The Mu Life;
• How Not To Get Your URL Banned From Digg, Pronet Advertising;
• Forbes Video Interview With Digg CEO, TechCrunch
• Three reasons why Digg gets its numbers wrong, Valleywag;
• The Privacy Implications Of Social Media, The Mu Life
• Spike The Vote, Will Get You Banned from Digg, Now for Sale, Marketing Shift;
• Digg Issues Cease and Desist to Diggdot.us, Micro Persuasion
• Shoveling on Digg, BusinessWeek

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:19 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

November 6, 2006

Topix.net Gains $15 Million Investment From Newspaper Parents

News aggregator and search engine Topix.net announced a new round of funding in which its newspaper owners, Gannett, Tribune Co. and McClatchy, have invested $15 million in the site to help further develop it. According to Hitwise, Topix has been on a tear and, according to the company itself, is now a "top 25" news site. Over the course of the past year Topix has had success developing community forums and has launched local classifieds. The site also recently implemented a news archive search.

I have more discussion of the investment and its potential implications for newspapers on my blog.

Posted by Greg Sterling at 9:06 AM | Permalink

October 30, 2006

Press Releases: Legitimate SEO Tools or Manipulative Spam?

The first press release was issued 100 years ago, and today there's a spirited debate raging about the value or legitimacy of press releases in a search marketing campaign. In today's SearchDay article, The 100th Birthday of the Press Release, guest writer Greg Jarboe offers a brief history of the press release and frames the debate over using press releases in online marketing campaigns.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 2:17 AM | Permalink

October 25, 2006

Next Up For Sale, Digg.com

Techcrunch reports that Digg.com is looking to sell the property for $150 million. Digg's recent discussions to sell included negotiations with News Corp, and some other non-disclosed bidders. The word is that Digg wants "at least $150 million" but no one is willing to pay that much to them.

Specifically one of the reasons mentioned is because Comscore figures claim Digg has "1.3 million monthly unique visitors and flat growth since April" but Digg claims they have "20 million unique monthly visitors and steep monthly growth." Danny reviews Rand's SEOMoz article named Website Analytics vs. Competitive Intelligence Metrics that concludes "no publicly available competitive analysis tool we're aware of provides solid value," including Hitwise or other reporting engines.

So does Digg have 20 million visitors? I do not know. It is hard to measure without direct access to one's server logs and even then things can be spoofed. Advertisers and those looking to sell their sites always want to represent the highest numbers as possible here. But can you trust any of them? There are just too many variables and ways to fudge those figures.

Postscript: Matt Tatham from Hitwise sent me some recent data on Digg.com, so I thought I would add it here.

Recent US data on Digg.com in regards to their potential acquisition talks: -Digg.com's US market share of visits increased 231% comparing the week ending October 21, 2006 versus the week ending October 22, 2005 -Digg.com US market share of visits increased 176% comparing September 2006 versus September 2005 -Digg.com is the third most visited website within the Hitwise US News and Media - IT category for the week ending October 21, 2006 -Digg.com is the ranked at 114 most visited website within the Hitwise US News and Media category for the week ending October 21, 2006 -Digg.com received 55% of its US traffic from Google for the week ending October 21, 2006

Thanks Matt!

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:47 AM | Permalink

October 24, 2006

November Elections Mashups

Maps have long been important in politics, as anyone who works in politics or watches the TV coverage on election night knows. And then there's the familiar saying, "All politics is local." Now, as reported on the Google Earth Blog, Google Earth has added "U.S. Elections Guide" and "U.S. Congressional Districts" information layers. By selecting these layers in Google Earth (not available on Google Maps) you can see boundaries of U.S. voting districts, links to information and news about the candidates, where to vote, campaign finance data and other election-related information.

Map-based real estate site HotPads has also created an interactive elections map for the coming November election. Click on any state and you can drill down on U.S. Congressional districts and information on representatives from Wikipedia and other sources. Here's an example from Florida.

I'm sure there are more out there. Let us know if you find them.

Posted by Greg Sterling at 10:50 AM | Permalink

October 3, 2006

How To Game Digg & Why You Shouldn't

Peter Da Vanzo shows how you can pay someone to Digg your content for a fee. SEO Blackhat reveals a guaranteed way to get your content on the front page of Digg. But after-all, is it worth gaming the Digg system or any social networking type of site's system to get that exposure? Rand explores the pros and cons of gaming Digg - it may not all be positive.

Posted by at 9:17 AM | Permalink

September 26, 2006

The Internet, 'Family 2.0' And The 43-Hour Day

Yahoo and OMD issued the findings from the latest round of their ongoing global research project in 16 countries that involves online surveys and in-person interviews. What they found is that through technology and multitasking families are cramming the equivalent of 43 hours of activity into a 24 hour day. They also found that the Internet (and mobile phones) are a significant part of the fabric of daily family life.

There's a lot of interesting material in the findings. The top level data can be found in this release.

The following data are some of the more interesting findings published (some of this is verbatim from the release). Families spend more time online than watching TV:

• Using the Internet 3.6 hours
• Watching TV 2.5 hours
• Using instant messenger 1 hour
• Emailing 1.2 hours
• Listening to radio 1.3 hours

Other results:

More than half (55 percent) of survey respondents age 18-34 agreed that without technology they "wouldn't be able to stay in touch with friends and family." More than a third in the 18-34 age group said their social lives would suffer without technology (34 percent) and that technology enabled them to overcome shyness (36 percent).

Two thirds (66 percent) of U.S. families surveyed use the Internet to research products, and 64 percent use a search engine every day. Families also use the Internet to share photos (62 percent), make travel reservations (60 percent) and research health (61 percent).

Internet now a primary resource for various categories of information, including some in local:

Families have adapted to new and changing media and technology, and now rely on the Internet as their top source of information on travel, jobs, finance and automobiles. Approximately half of respondents said they rely primarily on television for news (50 percent) and comedy (43 percent). Magazines are a significant source for celebrity gossip and other niche content. Newspapers are viewed as a strong secondary source, after the Internet, for information with a local flavor such as jobs, sports, concerts and events. And regarding advertising and media consumption...

Receptivity to advertising falls as ad channels become more personal. In the U.S., respondents reported that they were most open to ads in magazines and newspapers (72 percent), radio (60 percent) or TV (59 percent), and less receptive to ads on mobile phones or MP3 players.

Curiously there was nothing in the release about ads online or in search.

Postscript: Since viewing the report itself, I have a couple of things to add of interest:

Across the 11 categories of content that Yahoo-OMD explored (News, Travel, Jobs, Music, Movies, Finance, etc.) the Internet was the preferred source in all but two categories (News, Comedy/Humor), where TV was preferred with the Internet second.

Survey respondents in the U.S. were more open to ads ("It's okay to find advertising in each place") in traditional media than online or in mobile. The mobile finding is broadly consistent with other research in the market, but other studies have indicated people are open to paid-search ads and other forms of online advertising if it is perceived to be "relevant."

Posted by Greg Sterling at 11:44 AM | Permalink

September 5, 2006

Netscape Search Inserts Netscape News Above Web Results

What's this? Netscape Search has changed? So says Netscape's Jason Calacanis. What's new? From what Jason says and I can see, the big difference is that there's a new "Netscape.com results" section at the top of the page that shows you top voted stories from the Netscape community news service.

More on that service is cover in my Netscape Aims To Be Digg 2.0, Slashdot 3.0 With Community News Mode post. After the Netscape.com results, you'll get Google-powered results from across the web.

To be clear, this isn't a case of users voting particular stories to the top of search results, say on a query-by-query basis. Rather, from what I can tell, stories get popular over at Netscape.com itself. Then the top stories over there might show up in response to searches at Netscape Search, if they are a good keyword match. In other words, think of it as NetscapeRank. If a story has good NetscapeRank, that might help it rank well in keyword search results.

FYI marketers, it might not take much to pick up that rank. A query on cars gives me three results that have only one or two votes each. More than votes might be involved, of course -- and I haven't seriously poked at this in any details. But there may be opportunities, though the Netscape traffic is far, far less than at the major search engines.

From a searcher perspective, I guess it's mainly useful if you want to be alerted to news results in the course of your regular web searching. Places like Google and Yahoo have long done this already. The difference with Netscape is that you can get your news sourced from a community, rather than an algorithmic search engine.

Then again, use the Google Co-op link for Digg you'll find here, and then you'll sort of get what Netscape is doing, just with Digg as your news source showing up at the top of Google searches.

Perhaps down the line, we'll see Digg follow Netscape's lead and make it possible to search Digg and the web at the same time, something that doesn't seem possible right now at the Digg site.

Finally, search.netscape.com is a long-standing address for Netscape Search. That's still active and redirecting here, where the "old" Netscape search remains active.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:18 AM | Permalink

August 31, 2006

Topix's Cool Year-Long News Archive

Somewhat lost among all the search news earlier this month was Topix and its launch of an awesome year-long news archive. It's a great resource and much more than just a cool "click-o-gram" that you'll see at the top of news search pages.

News search engines typically only let you go back in time for about a month. After that, new stuff flows in and the old stuff moves out. That's terrible if you want to find news articles about a particular event further back in time.

Take Hurricane Katrina, for example. So a katrina search today at Google News, and the information is all from current headlines. Hit the advanced search page, and the best you can do is to go back in the "past month." The same is true with Yahoo.

Now let's try Topix. Do a katrina search there. After you're done, you should see a graph like this at the top of the page:

The chart shows you the number of news stories containing the word you searched for. Katrina was huge news a year ago, which is why you see those giant spikes in September 2005. Then it dwindles down until the new spikes happening now for the year anniversary.

Click on the graph, and you can change the results. For example, click in the middle of February 2006, and you'll see how results then get narrowed so that stories after mid-February disappear.

Want to just see stories from around the time the hurricane hit? Easy. Click to early in the month of September 2005, and you're set. By default, stories are then sorted in date order. That's useful because at the moment, you can't narrow to a specific time frame.

In other words, say you wanted only stories from March 2006 about Katrina. You can eliminate all the stories after that month easily, just by clicking on the line between March and April. The chart from April onward will go gray, meaning that stories from that point onward won't be in your results. But stories from before March 2006 WILL be included.

Topix had experimented with a two way "slider," a way to filter out stories from before and after a set period of time. That didn't make it into the current release mainly because of performance issues -- it slowed down the pages too much. If those can be tweaked, it might come in the future. In the meantime, at least the fact that stories from the particular cutoff point you select will come first may help.

Note that by default, keyword searches at Topix include both news and blog results. Want one or the other? Use the "Show Blogs or News" links near the top right-hand side of the page.

Also remember that for any search, you'll find an RSS icon and link at the bottom of the page. This is an easy way to have news results fed to you over time.

Along these lines, a call out is also in order for the many categories of information Topix has, as you'll see here. I mean, interested in dinosaurs? Here's a channel on that. NASCAR Busch Series? Here's the channel

Don't like clicking on a graph or can't for some reason. Use the advanced search page. You'll find options to narrow by time along with other features. Unfortunately, while you can restrict by source, you have to know what source you want to choose in advance (Google News and Yahoo News have the same issue).

Many have wanted Google News to list all of its sources (and generally neglect to ding places like Yahoo News or Topix for failing to do the same). A source list would help with this type of narrowing, but these services tend to view publishing that list as giving out too much data to their competitors.

Phil Bradley just wrote about how nice it is that Accoona's news search (powered by Moreover) makes it easier to restrict by publication. Accoona's system is a good compromise. From what I can see, you get a list of publications only relevant to a particular search you do. That's an easy way to give searchers more feedback on how to narrow without revealing your entire list.

While a year's worth of news data is nice, I still want more. Already, time has passed so breaking news about Katrina -- from when it happened -- is no longer in the Topix database.

Over at Find Articles, I can go back further. Here's an example of a search for stories mentioning the word "katrina" only for Aug. 29, 2005. That sounds great, but the search is restricted to "free articles" that can be read on the web without payment. Rather than there being hundreds of stories, you get only 55 matches, many of those coming from Business Wire.

At HighBeam, I'm able to do the same search. Free articles only brings back 44 matches from magazines and newspapers, with Business Wire being dominant again.

There are other resources beyond these, such as LexisNexis and Factiva, as Reuters notes in its article about the Topix expansion. Both those require fees.

Actually, Factiva will let you search for free, as you'll see in this query on katrina. They even have a little "Discovery Pane" showing a chart of news over the past few weeks. It's in the upper right-hand corner of the page. Similar to Topix, you can click on any time bar in that pane to narrow in on results from a particular period.

Unfortunately, try to click through to any of the stories, and you get a prompt to buy the service. The same thing happens if you try to use advanced search feature to go back further in time. If you do a lot of news searching, the $69 annual fee will probably be worth it. But for the more casual searcher, something like Topix will be a great boon, especially if they can let the archives grow further over time.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:01 AM | Permalink

Understanding Digg.com

Valleywag has an excellent Cheatsheet on What is Digg? Basically, if someone asks you what is Digg, just send them there. It describes the basics, how it works, how to break it, Digg's competitors, the recent publicity on Digg, "How Digg fits the buzzwords," oh and don't say "I got digged," I believe it is "I was dugg." Full details on Digg at Valleywag.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:24 AM | Permalink

August 30, 2006

Accoona Review In Ariadne

Accoonawas recently reviewed in Ariadne magazine by me. (If you're not familiar with Ariadne, it's a quarterly online magazine aimed towards the UK academic market, but with a general wide appeal). I won't go into the entire review since you can read it in the magazine but in brief I'm pleased with the recent developments of Accoona, particularly in the area of news and the easy ways in which searches can quickly be targetted by date, publisher, company, country and more. If Accoona has passed under your radar recently it may be worth another look, and if you're in Europe you can try the .eu version .

Posted by Phil Bradley at 5:49 AM | Permalink

August 8, 2006

Yahoo News Gains Search Engine News Market Share

comScore released a report showing Yahoo News has "31.2 million unique visitors" with 33 percent of all news traffic. Followed by Yahoo is MSNBC with 23.4 million or 25% share, then AOL News with 20.4 million unique visitors or 22% share. These numbers are based on June 2006 data.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 11:16 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 21, 2006

More 3D Maps, an iTunes Video Podcast Directory, .CA Goes Mobile & Wildfires Database: Specialty Search Wrap Up

This weeks specialty search wrap up from Resource Shelf includes more 3D mapping tools, a iTunes video podcast directory, the Canadian government mobile edition, a resource for locating primary sources with international news and a wildfires and forest fire real time database.

1. Loving 3D satellite mapping tools? Want to spot more North Korean Missiles & Chinese Helicopters? Gary posted a roundup of free open source 3D satellite and aerial imagery. You can even check out images of places outside of this world, seriously! More details at Resource Shelf.

2. Like to watch videos on your iPod or on iTunes? Well, Gary has the details on Search For Video adding a method of searching for videos that can be downloaded directly to your iPod and iTunes. To view the directory listing of these videos go to Podcast Video portion of the directory. More details here.

3. Oh Canada on your mobile phone! Do you have a love for the Canadian government? Are you on the road a lot? If so, you can now get your fix at the Mobile Canada Site. You can learn more at http://canada.gc.ca/mobile/wireless_e.html or at Resource Shelf.

4. Do you hate getting your international news via second hand sources? Gary writes about Diplomacy Monitor, a site that gives you access to "primary documents and news releases from various governments and government agencies."

5. Is your house burning down? I hope not! This is the season for wildfires and forest fire and Gary has compiled a listings of database that offer real time information and reports. Check them out at Resource Shelf.

That is our specialty search roundup for this week.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 11:12 AM | Permalink

June 28, 2006

Social News Site Digg Adds New Categories, Features

Sites that rely on user generated content are all the rage these days, from online encyclopedia Wikipedia to social bookmark sites like Del.ico.us. Digg relies on its 300,000 users to suggest important news stories from sites all over the web, and promotes those that get the most "diggs" (votes) to its front pages, providing a collective view of what web users think are the most important stories of the moment. Earlier this week the site rolled out new subject areas and tools that make it easier to drill down on the types of news that interests you personally and ignore topics that you don't find useful. More on Digg and this populist approach to "editing" the news in today's SearchDay article, Digging into the News.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 8:12 AM | Permalink

June 15, 2006

Netscape Aims To Be Digg 2.0, Slashdot 3.0 With Community News Model

I was never a big Slashdot fan, given that I found the conversations about search often had comments from people who didn't know what they were talking about. Digg came along and hardly won me over. Having one of my stories Dugg over there reinforced the idea that Digg was Slashdot 2.0 in all the wrong ways. Now AOL is trying to revive its flagging Netscape brand by turning it into a Digg-clone or Slashdot 3.0, if you will. You'll find the new version here.

Good luck. Seriously, I know Slashdot/Diggish sites are obviously popular with plenty of people who are not like me, and I fully recognize they serve their own communities. I've even pondered doing our own search version for Search Engine Watch, just as John Battelle has been thinking about this week. But if so, I'd never give up the editorial model that I'm used to. Call me old fashioned -- heck, I still like reading print newspapers -- but I still think there's a place for someone you trust to help filter out what they think is important.

Of course, any individual or small group might not have the "wisdom of the crowd" and miss a big event. So things like Digg definitely have a role. They also have their imperfections, too -- the crowd can be full of idiots or manipulated behind the scenes by only a few, as Digg's been accused of.

Anyway, perhaps Netscape will turn out to be a new super-site for the community news crowd. We'll see. As for the site itself, I took a fly though to see what's up.

The home page has a Netscape Anchors area at the top, where Netscape's paid editorial staff is picking out stuff to feature. That's nice. I like the idea that key things might get play this way.

Off to the right-hand side, you've got Channels, topics of various types. Want to see what's Dugg (Nugg?) for video games? Head to the video games category (conveniently its own subdomain, making it nice crawler-fodder for the search engines).

Each category has its own featured stories. Below that, you'll find the RSS feed for the page, allowing you to subscribe and get just the latest posts for that area. Nice.

Of course, one of Netscape's big selling features is the idea that it is both broader -- covering more than technology that Digg handles -- plus granular. You can get stuff just about movies or just about politics, if you want it. (FYI, Digg plans its own expansion next week).

What Netscape is doing sounds great, until you look at something like Topix. That's not a community generated news site. Instead, stories at Topix are automatically routed into particular categories. And those categories leave Netscape in the dust.

Video games? I don't want Playstation 2 stuff mixed in with Nintendo Wii items. At Netscape, that's going to happen. At Topix, Nintendo Wii is its own category -- with its own RSS feed, by the way.

How about contributing? You need to be a member. Sign-in here, sign-up here or recover your password here. I tried recovering my password, figuring I must be a member of Netscape somehow, someway. I still have my old, old, old AOL name floating about, plus I signed up for the Netscape portal ages ago, when it opened. But the recover feature just sat there grinding away until finally telling me to "Please try back soon!"

Fine. I'll sign-up. I'm not much into avatars, but offering five lame ones is, well, lame. Sure, you can upload your own. I'll get right on that!

What's the minimum information you can get away with to register? Name and email won't cut it. You've got to give up a birth date, as well. A ZIP code or post code doesn't seem required, but Netscape fails to tell you that on the reg form.

Then again, maybe it is required. I could never get my registration to process correctly. No doubt the new site is under a big load. No doubt they knew it would be, so the failure to keep up is either (A) lame or (B) calculated so they can say, "we're so popular that all the demand crashed us. Either way, it's not pleasing.

For any story, you can click to see what others are saying about it. You then have an option to say if the story is good, bad or block seeing comments from a particular person in the future. None of this can be done if you aren't signed in, however. I haven't explored this more, but all the voting probably helps stories rise or fall in Netscape plus allows individuals to gain more attention in the system

There are "Top Netscape Contributors," listed on the right-hand side of the home page. Want a list of them? There's no dedicated page that I can see. Similarly, while there are "Netscape Anchors" also listed, you can't find a page dedicated to all of them. More lameness.

I wanted to play with submission, but as I explained, the system's either not letting me register or I'm registered but it's not letting me sign-in. I can see that stories can be assigned tags in addition to being placed within channels. Ugh. It feels like Netscape is trying to straddle both the Web 1.0 and 2.0 worlds. As a result, you can see all stories tagged family or you can see all stories in the completely different family category. Nothing confusing about that.

Enough of my poking. How about what others are saying?

First of all, what they aren't saying is any help information on the site that I can see. Want to know more about how the new Netscape works, from Netscape itself? There's no info offered. Well heck, the privacy policy and the terms both gave me 500 internal server errors, because I tried to reach them from the family area, and the links (like this one) weren't pointing in the right places. I'm sure help will come, just as those bad links will get fixed, but it would kind of nice to have had it at the start.

Netscape from Jason Calacanis, who is running Netscape now, says pretty much zilch and just points at coverage elsewhere.

Digg this: Calacanis relaunches iconic Netscape.com as a "social news" site at SiliconBeat says the official launch is for July 1 and quotes Calacanis promising "open source journalism" and covers how other names for the site rather than using the beat-up (to me) Netscape brand were considered. But Netscape won out as being tied to the internet and discovering new content. Tied to the internet? Sure. Discovering new content? Yeah, right.

AOL's said to be bold and ambitious by turning a major portal into sending traffic to smaller sites. Um, that's called Google and Yahoo and any search portal you care to name.

The story covers that clickthrough rate is part of the ranking algorithm, so nice to know that will never get abused :)

The Los Angeles Times in Web Users to Make News on Netscape Relaunch talks about the gamble that AOL is making in possibly losing the 11.2 million people who visit the site each month, if they can no longer have the portal features they want. It also covers how the anchors will be sent out to do coverage in areas they watch over. It also talks about Calacanis as self-proclaimed renegade AOL employee who got much of the Netscape work done in a weeklong code jam. Perhaps that's part of the registration jam I'm dealing with now.

Netscape.com Relaunched As a User-Driven News Aggregation Site; Calacanis is GM, Netscape over at PaidContent.org talks about the site having eight anchors/journalists watching over the content and how current Netscape portal features like mail will move to AOL.

AOL to Turn Netscape Site Into a Newspaper of Sorts from the New York Times talks about the drop in visitors to Netscape (so why not throw the dice?).

New Netscape.com focuses on news from News.com covers more on how the anchors are following up on stories, plus how in addition to the eight anchors, there are 15 part-time specialists. It concludes with Calacanis not sure if it will be a hit.

Certainly, it's a brave attempt. I like the idea of trying to overtly mix in the editors along with the community participation. Whether those editors will get in the way of the community wave that's pushed along the popularity of Digg remains to be seen.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:52 AM | Permalink

June 9, 2006

World Cup: Google Does The Logo Thing; Yahoo & Ask Have Smart Shortcuts

Google's sporting a special World Cup-version of its logo in honor of the start of the World Cup today, while Yahoo and Ask are offering special results that come up after World Cup-related searches. A round-up of what's going on, below.

Over at Google, there's new World Cup module that you can add to your personalized home page to keep up on matches and standings. The company is also promoting the new module on its regular home page to encourage take-up. ZDNet has a screenshot of that. Here's what I see from the UK:

The Official Google Blog is also pushing other ways to tap into World Cup info via Google, though most of these things are pretty generic.

Gary Price has done a recap of other things in the search world touching on the World Cup, focusing on ways to get mobile alerts in the US and in Europe and the fast facts that FIFA is offering.

Gary also spots a World Cup Yahoo Shortcut you can see here (but no Yahoo logo change, not even on Yahoo Germany). Ask is offering a similar Smart Answer service as you'll see here. Ask also didn't change its logo, but the home page shows flags for each team in the World Cup:

Click on the flag, and you'll get a Smart Answer with related info like you'll see for the US here.

Over at MSN Search, no custom answers and no logo changes that I can see (nor at Windows Live Search, either). But back to Google, they are doing some OneBox answers, like you'll see here or here.

Over at Technorati, there's nothing on the home page indicating anything special for the World Cup for those who want to track it in the blogosphere. Clearly if Niall Kennedy hadn't left, the World Cup would be all over Technorati. Niall declares his love of soccer here today (so Niall, get on your MSN Windows Live colleagues to do something).

OK, OK, the MSN portal home page is at least pointing to a two minute guide to the World Cup done in conjunction with Fox Sports. Of course, this is the same partnership whose official store can't send US football kit for kids when promise, so phooey on them. More on that, plus my own thoughts on the World Cup madness that's starting on my personal blog in In The Middle Of World Cup Mad England, I Root For The US.

Don't forget, yesterday's post US, UK Searchers & The World Cup covered some of the top searches involving footballers in the UK and the US.

Am I missing something? Comment!!! It's easy -- just head to World Cup, Search & Stuff at our Search Engine Watch Forums.

Postscript: Google Blogoscoped notes there are different country-specific logos at Google using the team colors of those countries

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:23 AM | Permalink

May 8, 2006

Tech Memeorandum Gets New Name: Techmeme

Memeorandium's tech page has been on my essential reading list since it launched almost two years ago. About the only downside has been remembering the name. I'd always be misspelling it. Problem solved. Creator Gabe Rivera has given it a new name, Techmeme, and a new domain: techmeme.com. A bit more from him on the change here: Goodbye tech.memeorandum, Hello Techmeme.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:52 PM | 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

April 18, 2006

Ask.com Remembers San Francisco's Great Quake Of 1906

As a native Californian, plus having had my mother and sister live in San Francisco for twenty years, the Great Quake Of 1906 is pretty much ingrained in me. It's the 100th anniversary of the quake today, and Ask has a short guide up to some information about it -- plus they are doing a variety of Smart Answer results for searches on the topic. Disappointingly, Google, MSN and Yahoo aren't doing anything like this for searches on "san francisco quake" or "1906 quake." But Google News and Yahoo News bring up plenty of stories about the anniversary, as does Topix.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:37 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;

• My Yahoo
• NetVibes
• Topix.net
• Findory
• Gixo
• Google News

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:31 AM | Permalink

March 20, 2006

Yahoo Launches Local News Beta

Search Engine Journal reports that Yahoo News has launched a local beta version. For example, you can go to news.yahoo.com/local/New+York to check out local news in New York. I do not currently see an RSS feed for local news results. There is a link to "Suggest a Local News Source" that takes you here. I am a big fan of Yahoo's local efforts, especially at local.yahoo.com but these local news headlines can be done better, in my opinion. Postscript From Danny: Want to see all the local news available? Visit the Yahoo Local News home page here. You should see a map of the US with a drop down option to choose a state, then a local news area. Don't panic if that page then suddenly refreshes to automatically take you to a particular area. If that happens, look in the lower right-hand side of the page. You'll see a "Browse More Local News" area with the map and the drop-down box.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 10:24 AM | Permalink

March 14, 2006

Memorandum Launches WeSmirch Gossip Tracker

I love Memeorandum's tech page, which consolidates breaking tech news stories in an easy to digest manner. Now Memeorandum's technology is powering the new site WeSmirch, which gives you gossip in an orderly fashion. Hey, Charlize Theron is single again! Jennifer Aniston doesn't want pity! Isaac Hayes is quitting South Park! By the way, WeSmirch remains a proud member of the Memorandum family. It just doesn't use that domain because, "celebritygossip.memeorandum.com is just too awesome a name for the world to handle at this time," says the service.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:06 AM | Permalink

February 7, 2006

Tracking the Technology News Trackers

"Meme" trackers like Memorandum and Topix.net show you what's currently hot in both mainstream news and in the blogosphere. They're great services to help you keep up with both breaking news and trends.

Richard MacManus has put together an excellent summary of the current generation of these meme trackers, specifically looking at how they handle technology news and postings, and concludes:

All in all, Memeorandum still comes out trumps in terms of clustering layout, speed and relevancy. Topix.net and TailRank are strong services too. Also I suspect Chuquet and Megite will pick up the pace once they've enhanced their interfaces.

Read on for more in Rating the Meme Trackers.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 5:08 PM | Permalink

February 2, 2006

Yahoo News Not Competing With Content Owners; Personalization, Better Recommendations May Come

Greg Linden points to the Budde Outlines Yahoo News Future article at MediaPost, where Yahoo News general manager Neil Budde reassures content owners that Yahoo News doesn't want to compete with them with its own original news content. Um, then why does Yahoo have it at all? Budde says Yahoo's own content will only be in areas underreported by the mainstream media. He also covers plans to create personalized news pages and the possibility of a better recommendation service, perhaps more Digg like in nature.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 1:17 PM | Permalink

January 26, 2006

askSam Now Offering Searchable Databases (Free) Containing U.S. Copyright Law, The DMCA, and Every State of the Union Address Back to 1790

On what is a growing number of occasions we've beeb highlighting the good and very useful work that Phil Schnyder and his team at askSam are doing by are providing free searchable and browsable (online or download and use offline) to classic books, government and legal documents, speeches, and more utilizing askSam database software.

Today, we've learned that ask Sam has just released three new databases (what they call eBooks) that might be of interest to some of you, especially those with an interest in copyright issues.

First, U.S. Copyright Law (title 17 of the US Code) "Search and analyze the full text of the Copyright Law of the United States of America & related laws contained in Title 17 of the United States Code. Copyright is a form of protection provided by the laws of the United States (title 17, U.S. Code) to the authors of 'original works of authorship,' including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and certain other intellectual works."

Second, The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) "Search and analyze the full text of The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Passed in 1998, the DMCA is a bill designed to bring the Copyright Law up to date with digital media."

Third, State of the Union Addresses of the American Presidents "Search and analyze the full-text of all State of the Union Addresses from 1790-2005."

A complete and rapidly expanding list of ask Sam book, all free, can be found here.

Btw, to view offline you'll need a free copy of the askSam reader.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:13 PM | Permalink

January 25, 2006

Scoop: Google News Leaves Beta!

Google News has officially grown up, after more than three years in development. "That’s 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 17, 2006

WSJ Profiles Digg News Technology Site

Digging Out the News at the Wall Street Journal gives you some background on Digg, a two year old technology news site that's risen in popularity over the past several months.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:14 AM | Permalink

January 15, 2006

Celebrate the Life and Work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. With New Digitized Newspaper Database

I just mentioned this new database on ResourceShelf and I think it's more than worthy of a post here on the SEW Blog.

The MartinLutherKingJrArchive.com database was released on Friday by NewspaperARCHIVE.com.

This archive/database (FREE) chronicles the life and work of Dr. King. It contains more than 50,000 digitized original newspaper pages (keyword searchable). A browsable timeline is also available.

The archive includes stories from days of the Montgomery bus boycott, the I Have A Dream speech, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination on April 4, 1968, and thousands of other headlines on the civil rights leader.

Full image newspaper pages can be viewed online as PDF files. Pages can be saved locally.

NewspaperARCHIVE.com is a company that offers full text and full image searchable access to almost 29 million digitizes pages from newspapers. It's a fee-based service but they also offer several freebies including an historical crossword puzzle each day.

NewspaperARCHIVE.com is one of many companies doing newspaper digitization work. Other companies include ProQuest and ColdNorthWind. ColdNorthWind offers a consumer accessible database at PaperofRecord.com

Posted by Gary Price at 5:52 PM | Permalink

January 12, 2006

TailRank: A Social News Recommendation and Filtering System Gets a New Look

Scoble points out that Tailrank a service that, "finds the best content from thousands of blogs" (think digg or Memeorandum) that provides a "custom ranking specific to the user" (think Findory) has a new look and design.

TailRank also offers a mobile version (cool!) an API and is searchable. Registered members (free) can also import blog subscriptions to build a personalized reading list. Findory's personalized reader which was released last September also allows you to import your blog subscriptions.

The TailRank home page has a feature-filled left column that allows you to focus the page by time (1 hour, 2, hours, etc.), view "hot" tags, and find links to "hot" posts.

Registration (not required unless you want more personalized results) is simple and fast. Once registered you can add tags to items you read via the service and are also given additional tools to narrow your results page. You an also add your comments to any entry.

Although the TailRank home page mentions it finds material from blogs I also quickly spotted material from mainstream news sites like MSNBC and ABC News. I also found press releases like this one from the Nikon UK site and pages from company web sites.

Finally, most TailRank entries includes an image of the page, a permalink link, a text snippet, and and a number with the total amount of inbound links to it. Clicking the "inbound link" link shows you where the links are coming from.

TailRank comes from San Francisco and is lead by Kevin Burton, a co-founder of NewsMonster and Rojo.

I'm looking forward to spending more time with the service, especially its mobile version which might be great for quick pop-ins to see what's happening in areas I'm interested in. More later.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:36 PM | Permalink

December 19, 2005

News Aggregator Topix.net Keeps on Rockin'

Topix.net continues to evolve as a fantastic site for news and blog content, now offering more than 360,000 unique topics and categories. Gary offers a rundown of the latest developments at Topix in today's SearchDay article, A Gangbuster Year for News Aggregator Topix.net.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 10:52 AM | Permalink

December 15, 2005

Topix.net Has One Impressive Year from Both Business and User Perspective; Ends Year with New Look and Design

If you read this blog on a regular basis, it's likely that you know I'm a big fan and user of Topix.net. I've been a user since nearly day one and have seen the service improve on a very regular basis. This year when I was asked what some of my favorite new tools and services were of 2004, Topix.net was at or near the top of the list in most cases.

2005 has been what most would characterize as a great second year for Rich Skrenta, Chris Tolles and the rest of the Topix.net team. From the business standpoint, the biggest news would obviously be the acquisition of 75% of the company by three large newspaper publishing companies. 2005 also saw Topix move to new offices and announce a deal with the New York Times.

While all of that is some very impressive business, as is often the case, I would prefer to talk about what's new and useful from the user standpoint. The good news as with all of this change and "business" happening, Topix.net has not rested on its laurels. Far from it. Here's a quick look at a few highlights, some as recent as last week.

+ A new, crisp and clean look (and new logo) of the Topix.net home page and all category pages (what they refer to as channels. It looks great. Kudos on what Erin calls a makeover. Search results pages also have a new look. However, it's possible to click to the old or "classic view." (Last Week)

+ A recent increase from 300,000 to 360,000 Topix.net categories/channels. RSS feeds are available for all of them. (Last Week)

+ The addition what amounts to public forums for each and every article in the database. Personally, this doesn't do much for me but that's just me. I know that some people love to comment on everything so the forums encourage community (good business) and get people to return to the site (more good business). Users can also post their own stories (community journalism angle). You need to be a registered member to post. Micro Persuasion has more on these new forums. (Last Week)

+ The addition of 15,000 blogs to the Topix database that was already aggregating more than 12,000 "mainstream" news sources. They've done a solid job to this point of merging both types of content and picking worthwhile blogs. In my post that introduced this new content, Topix CEO, Rich Skrenta, shared some amazing stats about the blogosphere about the building of this portion of their overall database and the number of blogs in general. (November)

+ The expansion of Topix into Canada with new local pages for most Canadian postal codes and new Canadian sources. (June).

Other Things I Like and Fast Facts + I'm not sure if this was a 2005 or 2004 UI tweak but I appreciate how Topix separates press releases from other content. For example, this channel about the Health Care Industry clearly labels press releases in the column on the right side of the page.

+ Btw, many users don't realize that the Topix database offers an advanced search interface that offers several options including limiting your search to blogs or eliminate blogs from the search, limit by source, Zip Code, url, category, and/or date. Boolean is available as are fielded search syntax and wildcard searching.

+ Topix allows you to browse a small portion of its more than 360,000 topic directory

+ Email alerts. Still no keyword-based alerts or feeds (2006?) but this alert delivers headlines from the front page.

As you can see, 2005 was a great year for Topix.net both from the business side and from the user perspective. Let's hope 2006 continues in the same manner.

Postscript: Topix.net CEO Rich Skrenta and Chris Tolles, VP of sales and marketing, were also quoted and interviewed in the press many times in '05. Here are links to just a couple of those items.

+ A Conversation with Rich Skrenta and Chris Tolles from Topix.net An interview from the Online Journalism Review

+ Topix.net CEO Speaks

+ ODP Founder Comments & Moving Past Directories

Posted by Gary Price at 9:17 PM | Permalink

November 26, 2005

AOL High Quality Video Downloads, AOL Triton IM Gets Search Box & Sharing MSNBC Articles Via MSN Messenger

AOL is running an new trial of "high quality" video you can download, AOL's Triton IM tool has a new search box and MSNBC news articles can now be shared via MSN Messenger. More below on these features:

+ AOL Hi-Q? Video Video Trial First, a new beta from AOL that I've been using for about a week without running into any problems or concerns. It uses a Windows client (sorry Mac users) that downloads "High Quality" video content (in terms of video quality) directly to your computer. They're calling it the AOL® Hi-Q? Video Trial. Videos can be viewed on-demand or downloaded automatically in the background when your system is idle. You can even subscribe to certain content types and have the files delivered/downloaded automatically. Presently, the available content consists of movie previews, celebrity interviews, music videos, games tips and original AOL programming but I would be willing to bet will see much more content delivered using this approach in the future. This just might be the way (at least in concept) that will see (no pun intended) high quality video content will be delivered to computers in the future.

+ AOL IM AOL IM Triton Released Along with a bunch of new features, the new AOL Triton IM release has a search box built into the IM box. MSN Messenger offers a shared search option (along with a search box in the client) while Yahoo Instant Messenger also provides a search box built into the IM client.

+ MSNBC News Articles via IM Most MSNBC news posts now have a link at the bottom of each article that allow you to share the item via MSN Messenger. You'll need to use IE. More in this blog post.

Posted by Gary Price at 4:59 PM | Permalink

November 14, 2005

New: Searchable Database of Published Opinions by Supreme Court Nominee, Judge Samuel Alito

I usually post this type of material over on ResourceShelf but thought that this one was worthy a post on our blog. Database company askSam continues to provide useful and free (always nice) searchable databases of books and other interesting documents. With the hearings for Supreme Court nominee, Judge Samuel Alito, coming in January, askSam has put together a searchable and/or browseable database (available online or offline via a download) with more than 350 of Judge Alito's published opinions and decisions.

You can find other free askSam databases listed here. Here's a recent blog posting about one of those free databases, a searchable version of Da Vinci's Notebooks.

Postscript: For more materials about Judge Alito, check this collection of resources (many web accessible) compiled by the Law Reading Room at the Library of Congress.

Posted by Gary Price at 7:09 PM | Permalink

November 6, 2005

15,000 Blogs Added to Topix.net Database

Material from 15,000 blog sources have been added to the Topix.net database. Topix.net already contains material from 12,000 mainstream media sources. Items from blogs and mainstream sources are mixed on topical "feed" pages and search results pages. Topix CEO, Rich Skrenta, has the details (including some great charts and stats) on the company blog.

If you've never visted and/or used Topix.net, it's more than worth a look. I use many times each day (it was one of my top new resources for 2004) either as a news search tool or by browsing some of the more than 300,000 topical "feeds" and 30,000 local feeds that are constantly updated. Btw, Topix also does a great job of separating press releases from other content (look for the PR Scan link in the left column of every page). Channels are available for every Zip Code in the U.S. (and most postal codes in Canada) as well as celebrities, industries, and much more. I find material via Topix I either don't see elsewhere or see it using Topix first. Every channel can be viewed on the Topix site or can be via RSS.

So, let's get to today's news from Topix.net about the addition of content from more than 15,000 blogs to their crawl of more than 12,000 news sources.

Highlights + Blog posts are currently highlighted in a tan/manila box to separate them from mainstream media. This is most likely a beta and will not be the final UI.

+ Topix crawls both RSS and HTML. However, Rich Skrenta tells us that it's an RSS crawl for most of the blog content.

+ "Posts should show up on our site and search index within 1-3 minutes of being crawled." Note: Our blog as well as the DocuTicker site I edit were fortunate enough to be two of about 500 blogs that have been in the Topix index prior to today. I can say that many times I was able to find something I posted in Topix within a VERY and I mean a very few minutes.

+ The Topix blog post offers a pie-chart comparing the amount of posts (by topic) from weblogs versus what Topix calls "mainstream media." Interesting. The only thing I'm unclear about what is precisely a blog and does the definition vary from blog to blog? For example, does a "blog" from the BBC, Washington Post or MSNBC count as a blog or a mainstream source? I'll admit that this is a gray area as blogs become more mainstream. Just how a blog is defined these days is very debatable.

+ The numbers. Topix.net CEO Rich Skrenta offers some insights and numbers the "real" number of blogs out there versus the amount of spam blogs that exist. Very interesting and some might say, amazing numbers that will sure have people talking. I'll leave it at that for now. Tag the following numbers: wow. (-:

While the total number of unique feeds that have ever existed, or blogging accounts that have ever been signed up can certainly be counted, what is far more relevant to us is the composition of the daily posting stream. [My emphasis] What we're seeing is that 85-90% of the daily posts hitting ping services such as weblogs.com are spam (take a look for yourself). Of well-ranked non-spam blogs that we've discovered, we've found about half haven't been updated in the past 60 days. Our filters sift through what's left, which even after discarding 95%, is still a great deal of good material.

Why 15,000 Blogs? Who Made the Selections? So, how did Topix choose the 15,000 blogs that are now in the database? Skrenta explains that more than 1 million blogs were crawled and then ranked using their NewsRank algorithm that looked at blog posting frequency, writing style, type of reference, popularity, etc. We also learn that 15,000 blogs is an arbitrary number and Topix hopes to add more (lots more) moving forward.

Adding Your Blog If you're blog isn't included in the Topix crawl, you can submit your blog (and give feedback on the service) here.

This is all very new and I look forward to seeing how useful the blog content is versus what I've been finding from Topix over the past year. One feature that would be good to have is an option to toggle either blog content or mainstream media content on or off both topical pages and the advanced search interface.

More later.

See Also: An OJR interview from earlier this year with Rich Skrenta and Chris Tolles from Topix.net

Posted by Gary Price at 10:51 PM | Permalink

Feedster Beta Testing Podcast Search Tool, Adds "Official" News Provider Search

I just noticed on the Feedster home page that Feedster is now beta testing a "podcast" only search tool that current indexes (there numbers) 27,482 podcasts. I also noticed another new tab on the Feedster homepage that offers a "news" only search from "official news providers." Interesting. I would like to learn more on what makes an official news provider, official. No info on the official Feedster blog about the betas. However, the blog Socklabs from a person who works at Feedster, points out both of these new additions and also notes that Feedster has been growing their index of Asian blogs.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:42 PM | Permalink

October 18, 2005

All the News that's Fit to Crawl

News search engines and headline aggregators are playing an increasingly important role in the way people consume online news. These services offer a wealth of information from news sources and blogs all over the world, making it easy for a reader to take in multiple opinions. But these services also offer intriguing opportunities for savvy search marketers to get even broader distribution, if they follow a few guidelines for optimizing content. Guest writer Shari Thurow has the scoop in today's SearchDay article, Meet the News Search Engines.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 10:09 AM | Permalink

October 17, 2005

Getting Informed about New News Aggregator Inform

There has been lots of attention today about a new online news aggregator of (news and blogs sources) named Inform.

It's a "true beta" (as opposed to non-true betas? (-:) but expect much more about this service in the future. The company is very outfront about that. I'll likely have more to say in a longer post once I have more time to spend using Inform and new features are added.

However, I thought I would toss out some observations from the outset.

One of my favorite things about the Internet is the competition it causes which, in most cases, can only mean good things for the searcher. Like most of what I write for SEW, I'm going to look at Inform from searcher/user perspective. For more from the ad side, take a look at this Clickz article by Zachary Rodgers.

Again, I hope to write more about Inform and similar news aggregators in the future.

Thrilling? Not! First, three things I'm not thrilled about:

+ Inform will work with Firefox. However, unless you use Inform with IE "...you will not have the benefit of some of the unique navigational aspects." That's disappointing as a Firefox user. Inform will also work with Opera but once again some of the advanced features are unavailable.

+ You must register to take full advantage of some services. Yes, it's quick and easy but it might be a drawback for some users.

+ Finally, RSS types will be sad to learn that their is NO RSS of any type available at this point from Inform. However, Inform CEO, Neal Goldman, told me that RSS functionality will be coming "soon."

Fast Facts + At the present time (and another main reason to give Inform more time to grow) the database provides access to under 1000 sources and even fewer blogs. That's not a lot. Also, I'm still looking for a good definition of just what a blog is these days. And differentiations between how one site counts a source vs. another, is old news and one for future posts. + The current set of blogs were chosen are picked by hand based on what's popular in a subject area. + Inform does NOT crawl RSS feeds (a good thing, IMHO) but goes directly to the source and crawls the actual HTML. + Techies, Inform uses lots of AJAX

Let's Open Up Internet Explorer OK, to get to the full-featured Inform service, I open my IE browser.

Registration and login was not an issue. Then a NEW Inform browser window opens (make sure your pop-up blocker is ready). Now, let's take a look.

At the top of the "front page" you'll find top stories listed in various categories and from various sources. The only advertising I noticed was an ad on the right side of the page. You'll also find links to go to individual subject categories near the top of the page. Btw, related articles are grouped together.

Clicking a story link takes you to the content. But first, notice the two icons next to each story. One allows you to save the story ("flag it") to save and look at in the future. The other, icon, opens up two windows in the Inform browser. The "left" window is a dynamic search of all Inform articles having to with the topic that can be sorted by relevance. The "right" window has related topics, people, places, etc. drawn from the various articles. Clicking on the arrow icon opens a new window for that topic, person, or organization. You can also click the "plus" button and begin creating a detailed search string "ANDing" names together.

One thing I don't like is when I finally found an article that I want to read, it's a challenge to find the actual URL of the article.

Taking a Look at an Actual Article Ok, you've done some browsing and searching and now it's time to read some articles discovered via Inform. You'll notice that above each article is a set of boxes (I'll let you decide if it's a frame) that offer various info options. Inform calls it the "Discovery Area" One box lists people related to the story (sometimes very tangentially), another lists organizations listed in the story. Each name, company, etc, is hyperlinked to find related info in the database. Lot's of stuff here but in a few searches I ran, it needs to improve. I found several suggestions in these pull-down menus that appeared to make little sense.

Other Tabs Here's a look at the other tabs beyond."Top Stories".

+ Hot Channels Direct links to pre-built "dynamic" pages on various topics. Goldman said they have "millions" of channels but only a few are listed here. Clicking a "channel" takes you to a list of current articles (various sorts available) and the full text of the top article. Of course, the Inform "Discovery Area" is also visible above each article.

+ My Channels This is where RSS might be very useful. Use the Inform knowledge base to create "channels" based on a specific interest or topic. Channels are based on terms that come from a controlled vocabulary which, if used correctly, can really aid in precise searching. For example, a search for "boxing" asks if I want (any/all) of boxing, U.S. Boxing Federation, Boxing Figuerora, etc. As you can see the vocab needs work because many other organizations and people should appear. If I'm interested in London, Ontario I find nothing when searching "London." Again, the vocab needs to expand.

+ My Sources Again, expansion, and a large one is needed. To find sources simply search by keyword and add. When I searched for sources using "search" as the keyword, all I found was the Yahoo Search Blog. It's also possible to browse sources by geographic region of publication. Another feature that's quite interesting and useful is the fact that you can limit (if available) to specific parts of a publication. Here's an example: Search for The New York Times. Then, on the left side of the Inform browser, click "edit". Now, a new window should appear allowing you to check/uncheck what sections of The Times you want to look at.

+ Flagged Articles This is where you'll find links to the articles you've saved while using the service.

Searching Searching is very basic but does work nicely in some cases. I searched for "MLS" and it correctly found and created the correct "Discovery Path" of Major League Soccer. I could then create a channel "AND" more to this channel, etc. I was also given other possible topics like soccer and sports teams and clubs The only thing that looked out of place was the listing in the "organizations" section for "Massachusetts Association of Realtors." Btw, it's possible to enter a term and get a result from the controlled vocabulary. However, it's also possible to rerun the search as a true keyword search. May be to complicated for the typical user, you bet. Finally, I didn't spot this "true" keyword search option in the "My Channel" builder section.

Final Thoughts (for now): + Needed, Addition of more sources + Needed, of Expansion of knowledge base, controlled vocab. They should talk to Tom Holt and leverage in his knowledge base from News Accumulator and other services that sell vocabularies. + Needed, Alert Tools. Let me know via RSS, mobile, email, etc. when something of interest is published. + Advanced Search (I wonder if some power news searchers would be willing to pay a small amount for a proximity operator and other features. + Needed, User Training First, Inform needs to get the word out. Then (much harder) they need to show the typical searcher that this service adds value and not difficult to use. That's a big challenge.

Let's give Inform some time and check back. Btw, I made an effort to not mention an Inform competitor, Topix.net in this article. Let's Hopefully, SEW can do a head to head comparison of both services in the future. That said, Inform doesn't offer a feature that people seem to love with Topix, local news pages for every Zip Code/Postal Code in the U.S. and Canada. I entered my current and several past Zip Codes and was offered zilch when trying to create a channel.

Stay tuned.

Posted by Gary Price at 7:37 PM | Permalink

October 11, 2005

Recap: VeriSign Acquires Moreover

Talk today about the VeriSign acquisition of news aggregator of Moreover. Here'a a quick recap of what people are talking about:

+ Via Niall Kennedy's Weblog Moreover Technologies has been acquired by VeriSign for between $25 million and $30 million.

+ via Rafat Ali and PaidContent.org "Gleaned some more info on the Moreover's acquisition by VeriSign, through sources ... the $25 million is on the low side; it is closer to $30 million, from what I know. Google did come in at the last minute with a higher bid, but too late ... the deal was done."

+ Via The Street.com "This latest acquisition is a part of an attempt to provide "some structure to the endless content or chat available on the Internet and to monetize blogs," said one person familiar with the company."

+ Via Nick Denton's Blog (Denton was a co-founder of Moreover) Fast Internet Business History Fact from Nick: "Moreover, which had a joint venture with the makers of Blogger, was all lined up to buy the company back in January 2001."

Last week, VeriSign acquired the Blogs.com ping service from Dave Winer.

Posted by Gary Price at 4:42 PM | Permalink

September 21, 2005

Hurricane Rita Takes Aim at Texas Coast

It looks like another massive and powerful hurricane, currently a category five storm, is heading for landfall somewhere along the Texas coast. Let's pray that we will not be needing satellite imagery to survey the damage. For those of you tracking the storm, The Wall Street Journal is making a Storm News Tracker available (free). It's updated with storm headlines as news breaks. Also, NewsNow is constantly aggregating stories about the storm from over 21,000 sources.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:46 PM | Permalink

September 13, 2005

More On Memeorandum

Further to my earlier post on the new Memeorandum blog and news service, I heard back from creator Gabe Rivera on whether keyword search would be coming, more about how sources are added and dropped and what other vertical topics may be coming. Below are the questions I sent and the email responses that came back.

Why no keyword search?

The shortest answer: focus and limited resources.

This was designed to highlight buzzworthy stuff. The assumption when I built this was that between Google News and Technorati/Bloglines, search of the "Live Web" is covered. Or at least very hard to surpass.

Still, it has occurred to me: the particular strengths of my system may be relevant to search. But getting from here to there will require very profound system architectural changes. It would be a big deal to accomplish.

I do plan to add a simple "powered by Google" search for the published stuff, but I'm assuming you're talking about searching the underlying data.

[NOTE: Yep, I was. For me, the main thing search would offer is the ability to create new vertical results outside of Tech and Politics but still get the Google-like clustering that's compelling]

Will keyword search be coming?

It's not planned, and if I change my mind, it will take, let's say, "many months".

Have you thought of publishing an entire source list? Is there any way for a site to determine if it's been selected as a source?

Here's something funny about the source list: it's not fixed. It changes constantly. If you and John Battelle start linking to a hot new search-focused blog, that blog will be added as a source, automatically.

And it may just as well be dropped later, automatically. So I don't have plans to publish a list.

Of course since there is no keyword search, there is less at stake in being "included". E.g., on Google News, even if you're never on the front page, if you're "included", you show up in search results. On my site, if you don't appear on the front page, there's no other advantage to being "included".

What are the next planned verticals, and when will they come out?

I'm really not sure when or what. Sports? Medicine? Gadgets?

Entertainment? Gossip? I don't know mainly because it takes some experimentation to see if a vertical will work. But I do plan to add more.

Many another one or two later this year? We'll see!

Gabe also said:

The unifying theme to all of my answers: this is a one-person operation, with no backing, pursing highly experimental ideas. So I'm unable to crank out a ton of technology, and I'm kind of making up the plan as I go along.

And on my saying the name was hard to spell correctly

Hah! Sometimes bloggers tell me the name "memeorandum" is good. I disagree with them and agree with you.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:10 AM | Permalink

New Memeorandum Great Blend Of Top Blog & News Material

New site Memeorandum provides a Google News-like clustering of news stories and blog commentary on various topics. So far, it looks pretty clean and nice to me, well worth anyone checking out.

Interested in politics? Then see the site's home page, as that's where political news and commentary is assembled. After tech news? See the tech section. Additional sections are promised to come.

Where's the content coming from? Creator Gabe Rivera explains more about the service here on the site's blog and how it's designed to tap into authoritative commentators and stories in various areas. However, that post and the site itself is sparse on details of the mechanics.

Fortunately, Robert Scoble has more info in his review here, having viewed the site in testing apparently for several months. The service uses a white list of tech and political blogs and then builds out inclusion of other sources based on what they link to. That can include other blogs or more traditional news sources.

Spotted via Dave Winer, Richard MacManus has another review here, highlighting more of how things work. In short, the more links to a post, the bigger the post headline will be.

Huh? To understand more, here's a look at what's on the tech home page right now. It's topped by a story from BusinessWeek on "Why eBay Is Buying Skype." That's the biggest link, and then there are "Related Items" below it, other stories from blogs or traditional news sources. Each story also has a "Discussion" line, which links to blog that may be commenting on the item.

Below the eBay item are other items, such as the launch of Memeorandum itself, a the trademark dispute over Gmail, the Game Boy Micro and so on. Each item may have further related items and discussion.

It's a compelling blend. For me, "blog" search has really meant largely commentary search. Many blogs comment on news, and many have been frustrated by existing tools making it hard to get the good commentary when you want it. But some blogs also report news, so excluding them from a "news search" has meant that you might miss news until it hits more mainstream sources. Memeorandum ties the two together nicely, especially managing that tricky switch of knowing when a blog is reporting "news" rather than commenting.

Look in the right-hand column, and you can see that you can subscribe to an RSS feed and get updated with new material, which apparently flows in every five minutes. The feed isn't as nice as the home page, in that the clustering doesn't happen, nor do you appear to get related discussion links for an item. But if you want to get a regular dose of most-linked-to stories, it's a nice solution.

Robert wrote that the service has done a great job eliminating noise and spam in the months he's used it. I've also found those to be a plague when I've tried blog search as places like Technorati or PubSub. My limited look so far gives a thumbs up on these fronts to Memeorandum.

On the downside, there's no keyword search facility that I can see. I want that, and soon! And be careful of the name. It's a play on meme + memorandium and probably a bad choice in that many will likely misspell. Heck, Robert did in the title of his post about the service. Use an E, not an O.

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our Search Engine Watch Forums.

Postscript: See More On Memeorandum with comments from creator Gabe Rivera on whether keyword search would be coming, more about how sources are added and dropped and what other vertical topics may be coming.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:47 AM | Permalink

September 6, 2005

Katrina Missing Persons Meta Search Tools from Lycos and Yahoo

Lycos has a new Search Katrina Missing Persons Sites meta search service now up. In one go, it checks listings from more than 35 missing person sites that have sprung up since the storm. Sources of these listings are listed in the right-hand navigation. You can also add a site here.

Yahoo also has released a meta search tool that simultaneously searches for names across a number of missing person boards from various sites including Yahoo Groups, NOLA.com, and MSNBC.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 2:40 PM | Permalink

September 5, 2005

Post-Katrina Images On Google Maps, Elsewhere, People Finding Project & Wiki Resources

Post-Katrina Images are now up on Google Maps, at least for New Orleans. There's also a variety of other images you can view, as covered below. Looking for people? A new PeopleFinder project has also sprung up.

Post-Katrina Images are now up on Google Maps, at least for New Orleans. There's also a variety of other images you can view, as covered below. Looking for people? A new PeopleFinder project has also sprung up.

Against my normal "no computer on the weekend" rules, I switched on the computer out of curiosity on Saturday to see if Google Maps had been updated with any views of New Orleans. Indeed so -- and now getting into writing today, I see the Google Blog has an actual post about this. You can use a red "Katrina" button to toggle between the view before the storm and after. Here's a close-up of the Superdome, before and after, that I was using to show my children the devastation. Another post explains the additional details available to those using the Google Earth software.

I checked MSN's Virtual Earth service, but so far, no special push to update images in that area that I can see. You can zoom in on the Superdome here.

Hurricane Katrina Resources & Aerial Images from Gary last week is points over to this page at his ResourceShelf blog with lots of other resources to consider, including these before and after photos from Digital Globe, which provides the imagery to Google. Be sure to check out Gary's post if you're interested in these types of views.

Katrina PeopleFinder Project describes a project designed to centralize various efforts to help locate missing people in the aftermath of the storm. An actual search page hasn't been posted yet, however. Volunteers to help with the project are requested. Some background can be found here. There's some criticism of privacy issues and duplication of efforts on that page, however.

Katrina Help Wiki is a parent page to the PeopleFinder Project and more of interest to those looking for resources and information now, as a variety are listed.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 3:41 PM | Permalink

September 2, 2005

More Hurricane Katrina Resources & Banner Space Appeal

Below, a rundown on how Craigslist is being used to help people search for temporary housing, aid and missing loved ones, a way to tag a map with information you know about the New Orleans area or check on partcular locations, some basic news searching reminders and an appeal from the American Red Cross for sites to donate ad banner space to raise donations.

• Craigslist Versus Katrina from Wired looks at how users of the Craigslist listing service are posting offers of aid and housing to victims of Hurricane Katrina. The key page to check out over there is here, listing lost-and-found (including missing family and friends), temporary housing and volunteer needs.  
• The Wired article also lists other online resources for checking up on missing people and a Katrina information map based on Google Maps that you can use to tag information such as dry areas or the status of locations.  
• If you're looking to keep up on news, there are the online services such as Google News and Yahoo News, of course. Yahoo News has a special Full Coverage page of the disaster worth checking out.  
• If you're a site owner with space, the American Red Cross is asking for people to carry variety of banner ads you can carry on your site to help generate donations. You'll find more info here.  
• Running AdSense? The Jensens blog explains how to carry these ads as an "alternative" ad on your site.  
• See also Hurricane Katrina Resources & Aerial Images from the blog yesterday, for information Gary's posted on his other site, ResourceShelf.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:11 PM | Permalink

August 25, 2005

AOL News Now A Top News Search Destination

Today's SearchDay, AOL News Joins the Big League of News Search Engines by guest writer Greg Jarboe, looks how AOL News has quietly become a top news search site, even surpassing Google News, though Yahoo News remains comfortably ahead.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:17 PM | Permalink

August 3, 2005

A Conversation with Rich Skrenta and Chris Tolles from Topix.net

Greg Linden points to an OJR interview with Rich Skrenta and Chris Tolles from Topix.net.

Since I primarily focus on search from the searcher/user perspective let me share a few comments about Topix.net.

If you've been reading the blog for the past year, you likely already know that Topix.net is a news search and aggregation service that I use several times a day. I regularly come across material via Topix that I don't find elsewhere (Topix crawls more than 12,000 sources). In other situations, I spot useful material with Topix before I see the it elsewhere. The more than 300,000 pre-built pages (and feeds) that Topix provides (they call them channels) are also very useful for not only the hardcore newsie (me) but they're also easy for new users to take advantage of and utilize. Basically, find areas of interest (including pages/feeds for every Zip Code in the U.S. and Postal Code in Canada) and either bookmark the page or place into an RSS aggregator. The interview includes discussions about:

• How Topix.net provides local news aggrgation for Ask.com, AOL, and others
• How Topix improves the placement of AdSense advertising
• Their categorizing algorithms
• Disambiguation Between Paid and Non-Paid Material
• Why They Made an Acquisition Deal with Three Media Companies
• Traffic Stats

Posted by Gary Price at 2:11 PM | Permalink

July 21, 2005

More London Bombings

News is coming in of further attacks on the London Underground. So far, it seems much smaller than the attacks of two weeks ago. News Sources On London Bombings is a post we did back then providing ways to check on news. I think you'll find all those sources remain helpful in trying to gather news on what's happening today.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:29 AM | Permalink

July 13, 2005

PressDisplay Makes Visual Copies Of Newspapers Available Online

Spotted via Robert Scoble, PressDisplay is an interesting site that lets you view newspapers from around the world as they appeared in print. There's an amazing collection of publications (alas, no Orange County Register for me), and a full list is here. You can also apparently keyword search for matching pages within a current edition that you are viewing. Searching across a range of publications is not possible, from what I can tell, regardless of what subscription plan you purchase. There's a free trial for anyone, then plans range from $10 to $30 per month for access. The lowest plan lets you read 31 newspapers per month -- either 31 different paper or 31 editions of the same paper. See the FAQ page for more. A press release on the upgraded service is available here.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:24 AM | Permalink

July 7, 2005

News Sources On London Bombings

It looks as if at least two people have died and there are over 100 casualties in the bombings that have hit London this morning. For news, some resources:

• Yahoo News UK has a special London Explosions page consolidating coverage. Also see some stories that will be placed on the Yahoo News home page by editors or try these hardcoded searches for london or london bombings.  
• BBC News has a master London Explosions page consolidating coverage. There's also an RSS feed for all stories related to the bombings from the BBC.  
• Newsnow has a special London Explosions feed, a good single page resource.  
• Blinkx has a special query they're maintaining to bring back live video news reports.  
• Google Video offers access to screenshots and transcripts of television news reports, primarily out of the US. Try searches for london bombings and london explosions.  
• Google News UK has some stories that will automatically hit the home page, but better try these hardcoded searches for london or london bombings.  
• MSN News UK has stories placed on home page, plus try these hardcoded searches for london and london bombings.  
• Technorati has information from blogs in a search for london, london bombings. It also has stories tagged as london and london bombings.  
• Wikipedia has a new 7 July 2005 London bombings page.

If you are in London and want to let others know in the search community that you're OK, or to ask about someone, we have a thread setup at our forums: London Bombings: News & Are You OK?

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:01 AM | Permalink

June 29, 2005

Topix.net Expands to Canada

Just in time for Canada Day, Topix.net, has expanded their service to Canada. Beginning today, Topix now offers a news page for Canada as well as local "news channels" (pages continuosly updated with local news and info) for over 4,200 Canadian cities and towns.

Here's a complete list of the Canadian cities and towns that have local news channels. You can also access a local news channel by simply entering a Canadian postal code into a search box. Topix.net has also added about 700 (and growing) Canadian news sources to its crawl.

Overall, Topix.net currently crawls and aggregates content from over 10,000 sources. More than 300,000 "news channels" are available including one for every US and Canadian public company and Zip Code. Every channel also has an RSS feed. In March of 2005, three large newspaper publishers acquired 75% of Topix net. The company also has partnerships with Ask Jeeves, CitySearch, AOL, Wondir, and Findory.

Posted by Gary Price at 9:22 AM | Permalink

June 17, 2005

Service To Compare Google & Yahoo News Results, Sort Of

Newsiness Google-Yahoo News Search, spotted via Phil Bradley, lets you see keyword search results from Google News and Yahoo News side-by-side. Well, sort of. Google clustering isn't shown and in fact, the order of stories is significantly off from what's a Google News itself. Results are also different than the order Yahoo News displays.

Postscript: Results are sorted by time at the comparision tool, which is why there is the difference. More on this in our forum thread, Google News vs Yahoo News. You can also comment there, as well.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:45 AM | 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 31, 2005

Topix.net CEO Speaks; FeedMesh Unified Blog Ping/Update Service Oveview

A couple of RSS-related items that crossed my desk today.

First, EditorsWeblog.com reports on recent presentations at the 58th annual World Newspaper Conference and the 12th World Editors Forum from Topix.net CEO, Rich Skrenta.

Second, the eWeek article: RSS Updates Moving Beyond Pings, takes a look at the FeedMesh weblog/RSS update service that several companies are working together to develop.

What's a FeedMesh? Called FeedMesh, the approach takes the dozens of ping services that exist today a step further by seeking cooperation among aggregators to share updates among themselves. The idea for the initiative, which is being championed by PubSub Concept Inc., was hatched last year during an informal meeting of aggregators and other leaders involved in RSS and blogging.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:26 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:

1. Bush May Risk Court Deadlock With Unpopular Choice (Update1)
2. Social Security adviser casts doubt on Bush plan
3. Bush would veto House bill on stem cells
4. Bush should have been told of plane scare - wife
5. Bush cheers FCAT scores for reading

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:

1. Bush says he does not fear violent reaction to Saddam photos
2. Bush: I'll Veto Stem Cell Legislation
3. Bush: Ideology Motivates Iraq Insurgents
4. Bush would veto House bill on stem cells
5. Bush threatens to veto bills easing ban on federal stem cell research funding

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

1. Bush May Risk Court Deadlock With Unpopular Choice (Update1)
2. Reid: Bush, GOP Seek to Reinvent Reality
3. Reid: Bush, GOP Seek to Reinvent Reality
4. Possible Supreme Court Vacancy Said Driving Senate Battle Over ...
5. Savannah Morning News (Isakson says filibuster will fail to stop Bush's judicial nominations)

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 17, 2005

Yahoo News Turned Into Tag Cloud

Yahoo News Tag Soup takes Yahoo News stories, extracts key concepts from article headlines and summaries, then automatically tags them into different categories. The results is a list of tags shown in "tag cloud" style, where the most popular topics show up bigger. Click on a category of interest, and you'll see all the related stories for that topic.

Pretty cool -- but why does the default have to always be alphabetical with these things? Why not show clouds ordered with the most popular categories coming first?

The creator of Yahoo News Tag Soup explains how it is done here. The Yahoo Search Blog today writes of loving it and also adds more details here.

By the way, technically this isn't tagging in the popular sense, where various members of a community label objects according to whatever syntax they want. This is clustering, where a group of documents is automatically organized into categories. But it looks and feels like tagging, so those who like to explore tag categories will feel right at home.

FYI, Yahoo News has for years had similar functionality in the apparently non-cool Full Coverage category system. Check out Yahoo Full Coverage, and you'll see stories topics placed into categories (ie, tags).

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:12 AM | Permalink

May 4, 2005

NewsNow Passes the 20,000 Sources Mark

A quick tip of my virtual cap to one of my favorite web-based and free news aggregators as it hits a noteworthy milestone today.

NewsNow, based in London UK, is now aggregating content from more than 20,000 sources. Wow! NewsNow offers access to material from both mainstream news sources and the blogosphere.

The service is not very searchable (NewsNow is a showcase for the company's fee-based offerings that provide more searchability) but as a browsing tool (yes, serendipity still can work) it's very useful.

NewsNow offers numerous pages that bring together news on various topics. Here's a page that offers Information Technology news. Pages also autorefresh every five minutes. NewsNow is also international in scope and next to every headline you'll spot a flag that shows what country the source is located in. If you're an out of your mind news geek, this page offers a continuously updated look at all new content as it hits the database.

Is NewsNow the only news tool you need? Of course, not. However, it's still a valuable service and one more than deserving of your attention.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:48 PM | Permalink

May 3, 2005

Snap to the News

Searchblog turns us on to a new site for news search called Newsfilter.com. It could also be called Snap News Search (beta). Yes, Snap.com is now offering a news search tool that allows you to use their technology to search and dynamically modify your result sets from disparate news sources. Overall, an impressive start!

Snap News Search offers the user to dynamically modify their results with words in the title/headline, date and time (something we don't see elsewhere), and source.

Results pages contain two windows. One pane contains a list of results. Another window offers you the option to read the lead of the story and see a live image of the page as you browse the results list. Clicking the page image delivers the complete article. A third click opens the article in a new browser window.

Since Snap is into full disclosure it would be great if they could provide a list of all of the news sites they're crawling.

Postscript: G.L. points out a SiliconBeat post where Mike notes that NewsFilter is not using their own crawl of news sites but rather a feed from Moreover.

Posted by Gary Price at 10:14 AM | Permalink

April 28, 2005

New Yahoo News Leaves Beta

That was fast! The "new" Yahoo News that went live in beta about two weeks ago, here's my overview, left beta early this morning. Yahoo News also provides a tour of the new services and features here.

Posted by Gary Price at 6:53 PM | Permalink

April 13, 2005

New Look and Features Unveiled in Yahoo News Beta

One area that I like to pay special attention to is news search and tonight some info about a revamped Yahoo News home page and a few new features that Yahoo News will begin beta testing by midday Thursday.

Update: The beta is now live.

As you know Yahoo News uses a combination of human editors, hosted content (feeds from over 100 sources like the AP and Reuters), and a searchable algorithmic database (crawling more than 7000 sources) to power the site. Mark Glaser's recent Online Journalism Review article provides a great behind the scenes look at Yahoo News.

So, what should you look for when the changes go live sometime Thursday?

+ A new layout for Yahoo News home page. Tabbed links to news category pages (Top Stories, U.S., Business, etc.) are now linked tabs at the top of the page. They used to be listed in a column on the left site of the page.

+ Boxes containing headlines of top stories in various categories are now visible on the home page. The entire page can be customized (categories added/removed and reordered). The Top Stories category cannot be removed.

+ It's now possible to view headlines from various sources without having to click off the home page. For example, clickable tabs allow you to quickly see Top News headlines from AP, Reuters, AFP, and other sources that Yahoo has relationships with.

+ A tab labeled "My Sources" allows you the option to add RSS feeds from various sources (both mainstream news and blogs) selected by Yahoo's news editors. Interesting to note that Yahoo doesn't use the word RSS at all here.

+ A few months ago Yahoo began beta testing YQ, their contextual search technology and starting Thursday, you'll begin seeing YQ technology embedded into news stories that Yahoo hosts. The Yahoo News team has developed a glossary of terms. If one of those terms appears in a Yahoo News story, it's hyperlinked with a chevron placed next to the link. A click will open up a YQ box containng a few news headlines for that term and links to run a web search, image search, a news image search. In some cases, let's say for a sports story, you'll find links to a teams homepage, team stats, etc.

Posted by Gary Price at 11:25 PM | Permalink

April 12, 2005

Rocket News Releases New Version of Desktop News Search App

RocketNews, a web news search resource that we've mentioned many times and like a lot, is online today with a new beta version of their desktop-based news search tool, Rocket Desktop 1.1. (Windows only). It's a free download.

The app (about 3.5MB) sits quietly in your system tray. A click and you now have a search box to access the RocketNews database of more than 16,000 sources. Titles of articles are listed in the app window and a click opens a viewer to read the full text. You can also email or bookmark the link from here. A right-click on the icon allows you toggle the number of results displayed and the time from of the search (past two days to 30 days). A link to download the Rocket News Desktop app is located on this page.

RocketNews also offers (free) a Java-based RSS reader and a web site that can be customized.

Posted by Gary Price at 4:34 PM | Permalink

April 4, 2005

Looking Inside Yahoo News

Spotted via Greg Linden, Inside Yahoo News from the Online Journalism Review looks behind the scenes about how Yahoo News is creating, ranging from human editors involved with Yahoo Full Coverage, through how use of RSS/feeds are growing, to partnerships with wire services for content that have saved it from getting sued, such as AFP is currently doing to Google.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 3:27 PM | 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 23, 2005

Kanoodle Ads Coming to Some RocketNews RSS Feeds

Via a news release we've learned that Rocketinfo, the providers of the RocketNews search engine, an impressive news and weblog search tool that we've mentioned on the blog many times, is announcing a deal with Kanoodle that will bring ads to keyword search-based RSS feeds that are built using the Rocket web interface (they also offer a personalized interface) or their Java-based RSS aggregator. The news release also mentions that ads will also be visible on the Rocket Desktop client that will be released soon.

RocketNews serves as a showcase for Rocketinfo's media monitoring and competitive intelligence services.

Last August, Feedster began placing advertising in some of their search feeds. They're also working with Kanoodle.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:11 PM | Permalink

Three Newspaper Publishers Acquire 75% of Topix.net

Congrats to Rich Skrenta and his Topix.net team.

Today, the company is announcing that a group of three newspaper publishers (Tribune, Knight-Ridder, and Gannett) are jointly acquiring 75% of Topix.net. Ownership will be evenly split amongst the three companies. Topix.net founders will retain a 25% percent stake. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

The Tribune, Knight-Ridder, and Gannett consortium are also joint partners with CareerBuilder.com, Cars.com, ShopLocal.com and other properties.

Rich and his team will remain in place to hopefully develop more impressive services (I would love to see more international resources) with the influx of capital that will now be available. That's good news.

I said in January that if asked to name my favorite new resources (from my researcher perspective) of 2004, Topix.net would be at the top of the list. As someone always on the prowl for news and info, I find great via Topix. I'm also thrilled that they are continuing to add more sources to their database. At the moment they're crawling about 12,000 sites.

From a business perspective, many organizations have also noticed Topix.net services. 2004 saw deals with Ask Jeeves, Citysearch, The New York Times, Findory, and Wondir. Recently, AOL said that they're using Topix.net services on AOL Local.

Rich Skrenta told Search Engine Watch that today's deal has been in the works for about four months and the new investors are "keen" on keeping Topix editorially independent versus giving a higher ranking and placement to content from their publications. That's crucial. He also said that the partnership will allow these publishers to leverage advertising inventory from their other properties while using Topix.net 150,000 topical "channels" (including one for every U.S. Zip Code) to show more contextually related advertising.

For example, someone browsing the BMW "channel" might be shown cars for sale in their local area from the Cars.com database or a person reviewing the Nursing channel be shown job openings in their area from CareerBuilder.com.

For more about Rich Skrenta, here's an interview with him from SearchEngineBlog and another from ResourceShelf.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:02 AM | 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 7, 2005

The Site that Inspired the Yahoo! Netrospective

If you enjoyed the Yahoo! 10 Year Netrospective that Chris just blogged about, take a look at 10X10, a site that inspired the Yahoo! page. Once an hour 10x10 takes RSS feeds from Reuters, BBC, and The New York Times and builds a "postcard" based on the 100 most "important" words. Links and additional info about 10x10 in this SEW Blog post from November.

Posted by Gary Price at 8:49 AM | Permalink

February 2, 2005

Topix.net and NY Times Announce Deal

Topix.net has made a deal with the New York Times. The AP is reporting that The Times has purchased the right to have some headlines featured on various Topix category pages (aka channels).

The New York Times will have three of its story headlines featured at the top of 80 categories for an undisclosed price. All but a few of the topics are focused on New York City and New York state.

``This is significant because even if you are the biggest and best newspaper on the Web, you still want to increase your audience,'' said Topix CEO Rich Skrenta.

More in the article: New York Times buys featured position on Topix.

Congrats to Rich Skrenta and the rest of the Topix.net team. As I said a few weeks ago, Topix.net is a resource I visit and use several times a day.

Posted by Gary Price at 11:38 PM | Permalink

January 13, 2005

Complete Boston Globe Archive Set for Digitization

Word from the AP that the complete archive (both text and images) of the Boston Globe will be digitized and made full text searchable by ProQuest, a well-known database publisher. The Globe will be the seventh paper that ProQuest has digitized as part of their Historical Newspaper program. The other papers are:

+ The New York Times- 1851-2001 + The Wall Street Journal- 1889-1987 + The Washington Post- 1877-1988 + The Christian Science Monitor- 1908-1991 + Los Angeles Times- 1881-1984 + Chicago Tribune- 1849-forward

The Times of London archive has been digitized by Gale back to 1785.

The NY Times provides free web access to their database here. Articles cost $2.95. The searchability of the database is limited, especially compared to what you can do when using the ProQuest interface.

Many libraries (public, university, etc.) offer free 24x7 web access (including the complete articles and ads) to these and many other full text databases from home, office, or wherever you can get web access. In fact, yesterday I was just searching the NY Times and Wall Street Journal historical databases for early mentions of info retrieval companies. These databases are highly addictive.

More about what libraries offer for free and without having to visit the library building in this SearchDay article.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:06 PM | Permalink

January 11, 2005

RocketNews Adds Local Television News Content

RocketNews continues to be a news search tool that I use on a very regular basis. I often spot articles and postings via Rocket that I don't see when searching using other tools. At the moment, Rocket is crawling and organizing material from more that 13,000 sources (very strong in business news) and 70,000 weblogs.

I just spotted an announcement that RocketNews has added content from hundreds of local television news broadcasters (U.S. only) to their database.

The addition of this local content means Rocketinfo customers can find relevant content from far-flung sources such as KRIS-TV in Corpus Christi, Texas, FOX Carolina, CBS New York and KCRG in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, content that is often bypassed by other news solution providers.

Posted by Gary Price at 8:41 AM | Permalink

January 4, 2005

Topix.net Adds New Channels

If I was asked to list a few of my favorite new resources from 2004, Topix.net would be at the top of the list. It's coverage (more than 10,000 sources and expanding), excellent organization (aka news channels), RSS options, and search capabilities make it a resource I visit and use many times each day.

Today, both the San Jose Mercury News and Searchblog report that Rich Skrenta and his team have added three new channels that will be of interest to those of you who track startup companies.

Here are the urls. RSS feeds are also available.

+ http://topix.net/startups News about 2500 privately-held startups automatically culled from the Topix database of 10,000 sources.

+ http://topix.net/startups/pr Press releases only from the list of 2500 companies.

+ http://topix.net/vc The Topix.net venture capital channel.

More on the Topix.net blog.

Posted by Gary Price at 11:09 AM | Permalink

Search & The Tsunami

Tara Calishain has put together a short link rundown on how various search engines have responded to the tragic tsunami that hit the Indian Ocean: Search Engine/Blogosphere Response to the Earthquake/Tsunami. They've primarily set up special pages linking to news and donation information.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:26 AM | Permalink

December 20, 2004

Complete Searchable Archive of Time Magazine Now Available

Today, Time magazine released their complete archive (full text of all article back to 1923) on the web.

Access to full text articles is free for Time subscribers. The archive is located at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/archives

Implied "and" between terms, phrase searching with "" marks, NO "OR" searching available.

An advanced interface is available and offers the following limits: + All stories or only cover stories + Date or date range + Sections of the magazine + Article length

The archive also allows users to browse/search a database of Time's covers You don't need to be a Time subscriber to view this material.

Posted by Gary Price at 5:57 PM | Permalink

December 13, 2004

More Search Term Refinement Tools

In Danny's blog post about the new Google Suggest beta he mentions a similar type of query refinement tool available from AOL's new Pinpoint Shopping.

It's also worth mentioning that Surfwax has offered a dynamic query refinement tool called "LookAhead" for almost a year. It's available with their news search database and offers search-terms based on a controlled vocabulary.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:36 PM | 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

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

Blog-Safe Content Links To Come From HighBeam

Years ago, Dave Winer helped negotiate a system that allows bloggers to link to the full-text of New York Times articles and have those links work even after the article has been pulled back within the NYT's archives.

Now HighBeam is doing something similar, beta testing a "blog this document" feature so that bloggers can link into material that in some cases might otherwise require a subscription to access. Or at least, that seems the plan. A bit more on this via ClickZ: HighBeam Picks Locke for Blogging Initiative.

Want to try? Sign up for notification over here. And how to do that New York Times linking? I believe it's something built into those using the Radio Userland tool, and Aaron Schwartz has maintained a tool for others to use. It's easy and great -- just enter a URL, then you get a link back that brings up the full-text of the article.

FYI, I tried to reach that tool today and couldn't get through -- I suspect it's just a temporary problem.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:54 AM | Permalink

November 30, 2004

More Personalization Services at Findory

Greg Linden is one busy guy these days. It seems like every week or so Findory launches a new service. About two weeks ago we blogged about Findory offer personalized web results (using the Google database).

Yesterday, Greg announced that Findory is now offering "personalized" search results for news and weblog content.

Want to try it? Read a few news or blog articles on Findory, then do a news or blog search for something related to some of the articles you read.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:41 PM | Permalink

November 17, 2004

Searching for Real Time Information

If search engines have an Achilles heel, it's that the crawling process lags the content creation process. While content from some sites appears quickly in search engines, it takes up to a month for crawlers to do a comprehensive refresh of all new web content. This means that all search engines, no matter how comprehensive, are to one degree or another out of date.

Today's SearchDay article, Managing the Firehose of Real-Time Information, focuses on PubSub, a service that monitors blogs, SEC filings, Newsgroup postings and other sources, and matches your keyword based queries against those sources in real-time. It's a great "prospective" tool for supplementing the "retrospective" results you get with search engines. It's also a terrific early warning system for new sources of information that you might miss using other tools, such as feed aggregators or blog search engines. Definitely worth a look.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 11:07 AM | Permalink

November 16, 2004

New Personalized Features at RocketNews

RocketNews, the news and blog search engine (about 11,000 sources) is online with a new look (layout and color scheme) and some new features.

Today, RocketNews launches the My RocketNews Portal where your five most-recent queries are saved and viewable on your MyRocketNews homepage.

That's just part of it.

+ MyRocketNews offers the user to personalize the look of the home page. All of the pre-built subject areas on your My Rocket News home page can be customized with info you want easily visible on the page. Let's say you're not interested in entertainment news, simply click edit, enter a query, and give it a title. Now, results for that query will be displayed on your MyRocketNews page homepage.

+ Finally, My RocketNews joins Findory and MSN Newsbot as a site the offers personalized results based on past click behavior. I'm not sure if this is the only thing they look at to determine a personalized relevancy ranking.

At present, RocketNews doesn't allow you to "transport" your saved searches and personalized relevancy to any computer. Findory offers this feature. If you don't want your searches saved and a personalized relevancy to be built, just use the main RocketNews interface and search box.

If RocketNews offered a registration option (if they do now, I can't find it), your recent searches and along with your personalized relevancy could be transported to various computers. This would also allow a single computer to have a number of "personalized" users.

Posted by Gary Price at 7:47 PM | Permalink

November 14, 2004

More Sources at Topix.net, Advanced Search Too!

Topix.net, the web-based news aggregator and search tool (thousand of RSS feeds too!), has just announced an increase to the total number of sources the service provides access to.

The Topix.net home page now mentons that they crawl more than 9,000 sources, up from 7,000.

Topix has also moved their search box to the top of the each page. You'll also see a more prominently displayed link to the Topix.net Advanced Search page. Here you're able to limit your search by: + Source + Zip Code or City + Category + County + Publication Date Let's hope more options are coming.

I'm happy to see that Rich Skrenta and his team are constantly improving an already first-rate service that I use many times each day. Topix is also an excellent example of some of the great work small companies are doing in the search business.

Chris mentioned a couple of days ago that Dogpile has now partnered with Topix. This is yet another addition to a rapidly growing list of partnerships. At the beginning of the month I blogged about new deals that Topix.net has announced with Citysearch, Yahoo, Info.com, and Ask Jeeves.

Posted by Gary Price at 8:53 PM | Permalink

November 1, 2004

New Look and Services at Findory

Personalized news tool Findory is online with a new look and several new services. You can learn more from Findory's CEO Greg Linden via a post on his Geeking with Greg weblog.

If you're interested in learning more about Findory, here's a recent interview that I did with Greg.

Posted by Gary Price at 6:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Topix.net User Survey: Bush ahead of Kerry by 13%

File in your "just for fun" folder.

The gang over at Topix.net have released results from an unscientific poll to find out who thier users support in tomorrow's election.

The results favored George Bush by a percentage of 55.2% to John Kerry's 41.6%. Ralph Nader pulled 1.5% and a generic "other" candidate pulled 1.5%. Duplicate votes were eliminated from the results.

The results are also broken down by:

+ Browser type (Firefox users picked Bush 49.70% to 43.60%).

+ Operating System (Macintosh users picked John Kerry 58.10% to 39.40%).

More info on this page.

Posted by Gary Price at 3:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 28, 2004

Blogs as Search Marketing Tools

Most blogs are simply convenient self-publishing tools, providing authors with an easy way to reach a relatively limited audience of readers. But blogs are increasingly attracting attention from search engines, and with a bit of creativity, can become an integral part of an overall search marketing campaign.

In today's SearchDay article, Web Feeds, Blogs & Search Engines, guest writer Mike Rende covers a recent Search Engine Strategies panel that focused on the increasingly important interaction between content syndication via blogs and search engines, and how it's changing the way we find and consume information.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 6:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 19, 2004

New Weblog Search Options at RocketNews

One of my favorite news search tools, Canada's RocketNews, has added a couple of new features to make searching and limiting to weblog content a bit easier.

First, you'll notice a pull-down menu next to the search box on the RocketNews homepage where you can limit your search to either news sites (over 11,000) or weblogs.

Second, on search results pages you're now given options (after selecting Advanced Search/More advanced settings) to limit your search by weblog category and location. RocketNews staff manually reviewed each blog in their database and then added the metadata to make category and location searching possible.

You can also begin your search using the advanced "weblog search" interface by going to this page.

Posted by Gary Price at 11:50 AM | 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)

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