ABC News Named Top News Site of 2005

Newsknife, an organization that monitors online news sites for quality and other metrics, has released its annual ranking of sites, with ABC News moving into first place.

Newsknife compiles its ratings by looking at a sample of 228,445 individual site listings at Google News by 3,395 sites for 1,311 news items since December 2004.

ABC News swept the field this year, with the most appearances as the No.1 source for individual news items at Google News, the most appearances on Google News home page and the most appearances overall.

According to Newsknife, the top ranking news sites this year, based on total number of appearances on Google News, were:

1. ABC News
2. The New York Times
3. Reuters
4. The Washington Post
5. Guardian Unlimited,UK
6. Voice of America
7. SFGate.com,CA
8. Bloomberg
9. Times Online,UK
10. International Herald Tribune,France
11. CNN
12. The ChristianScienceMonitor

Newsknife also monitors several other factors, including the number of times a particular news site is displayed at one of the top two stories on the Google News home page. ABC News did well here also, but a number of other web sites appeared in these coveted top positions.

For the entire year, Reuters led with 18 top story links and 20 second story links. ABC News had 17 and 16 appearances, respectively, while Bloomberg (13, 6), the Kansas City Star, MO (7, 8), SFGate.com, CA (8, 2) and CNN (5, 4) also appeared in top positions more than other services.

These statistics are interesting not just because they highlight high quality news organizations, but also because they show that Google doesn’t appear to favor certain news sites over others in determining the relevance of particular stories. In fact, several less popular and non-western news sites saw an increase in Google News home page exposure, including Monsters and Critics, UK, Sify, India and News24, South Africa.

This is the fourth year Newsknife has published these ranking statistics. More information, including additional breakouts of popularity, are available via Newsknife Top News Sites of 2005.