The FIEG, an association of Italian editors, recently tried to sue Google’s News service. They claim: “Google is preventing editors from choosing freely which articles should be posted on the website”. The editors are also claiming that websites which don’t want to be published on Google News would also be automatically excluded from Google’s standard search results. Italian antitrust authorities have started investigating Google Italy on the basis of “predominant position abuse” and will publish the results of their research and findings on October 15th 2010. Google Italy didn’t take that long to reply. Here is their official response from Josh Cohen, business product manager for Google News, which makes perfect sense to me: → Read More
Last week, the Italian government began an investigation into Google and Google News about allegations of anti-competitive behavior. (For more details, read Google’s initial response or Danny Sullivan’s take). Italian newspaper publishers claim that Google News is stealing readers from them who skim the headlines on Google News and never bother to click through. It is a familiar refrain, to which the obvious response is: If newspapers want readers to click on their headlines, maybe they should write better headlines.
But implicit in these arguments, and an investigation into how Google News is somehow stifling competition in the Italian news industry is that Google News dominates the news in Italy, at least online. That is not the case. According to comScore, the Italian audience of Google News is smaller than at least two of the largest Italian newspaper sites, La Republicca and Corriere Della Sera. In July, Google News had 2.4 million Italian readers versus 3.8 million for both of those Italian newspaper sites. (These numbers reflect only visitors from Italy). → Read More
Here we go again. The newspaper industry is blaming online news aggregators for its dwindling profits and inability to adapt to a world of links and truly-free flowing information. (They like it when information flows freely into their pages, but not so much when it flows out).
On Thursday, paidContent ran an essay by media consultant Arnon Mishkin called “The Fallacy Of The Link Economy” which was misguided on so many levels.
The newspaper industry wants to go back to the world before the Web, when each newspaper was a small media bundle packed with stories, 80 percent of which sucked. But it didn’t matter because you’d gladly pay a dollar to read the one or two stories that caught your eye on the front page, hoping there would be more inside. Well, guess what? The media bundle is dead. News sites can no longer capture reader’s attention with 20 percent news, and 80 percent suck → Read More
A short post on the Google News blog today revealed a big number: Google recently quadrupled the number of newspaper articles in its News Archive Search. You may recall that at TechCrunch50 last year, Google’s Marissa Mayer demoed this powerful news tool that can search the text of publications far back in time — some over 200 years old.
The recent update saw Google add a bunch of new publications, including some from different parts of the world. And it even has a newspaper in the archives from 1753 now. The fact that it’s searchable is fairly insane. → Read More
There are a couple of places where you can go to get your fill of tech-related information and keep track of breaking news and events outside of your RSS reader or e-mail inbox. Google News isn’t one of those places (yet), but Techmeme and to a lesser degree Alltop, popurls and Digg are some of the most frequented websites when it comes to pleasing those who like to stay on top of hot tech news (us included).
Techmeme is undeniably the leader of the pack; it has solid algorithms and ranking systems in place that can quickly detect breaking news and gives you a clean overview of which other technology news sites and blogs are discussing it practically with minimal lag. It has its flaws, sure, but I dare you to show me a service that does what Techmeme is supposed to do better than they are. → Read More
Google is about to launch a new Google Labs project it calls Flipper, we’ve learned. No, it’s not a dolphin. As you can see in the screenshot, it looks like the project is a more visual way to read Google News, or to “flip through it,” as it were.
While we have yet to use it, what looks nice about it is that you can not only browse by sections, but also by sources, keywords, and most importantly by elements such as “most popular” and “recommended.” The visual representation probably won’t revolutionize Google News’ often sub-par performance, but the better filters could. → Read More
I’m sorry, but for as good as Google is at organizing the world’s data, Google News absolutely sucks. Now, to be fair, I’m going to focus on Google News from a tech news perspective, because that’s what I follow. Maybe it’s better in other areas, but I doubt it’s much better. I bring this up because a new update to the service today promised “More ways to see the story.” Okay, that’s true, as long as you don’t mind seeing stories that range from partially unrelated to entirely unrelated.
Now, when you click on the “all XXXX news articles” link below each story cluster in Google News, you are taken to a page with a range of content. This includes not only major publication headlines, but blog headlines, picture thumbnails, a timeline of articles on the topic, and even quotes about the topic. The problem, as you can see in my screenshots below, is that Google cannot seem to cluster stories together correctly. → Read More
Arianna Huffington testified today before the Senate Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet in a hearing on the “Future of Journalism.” The Senate was contemplating the future of news, particularly newspapers, and will consider what (if any) action Congress needs to take to save the industry. Those who testified include Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Products and User Experience at Google; lberto Ibargüen, CEO of the John S. And James L. Knight Foundation; David Simon, writer and producer of The Wire, and former Baltimore Sun employee; Steve Coll, former managing editor of The Washington Post; and James Moroney, publisher and CEO of The Dallas Morning News. You can see the transcripts of their testimonies here.
Huffington says in her testimony that traditional media has been afflicted with Attention Deficit Disorder, saying “they are far too quick to drop a story-even a good one, in their eagerness to move on to the Next Big Thing.” Online journalists, she says, have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder because “they chomp down on a story and stay with it, refusing to move off it until they’ve gotten down to the marrow.” She goes on to say that the two afflictions should be merged to produce optimal journalism. → Read More
Timelines are becoming an increasingly popular user interface. Today, Google Labs launched a new product called Google News Timeline, which lays out the top stories from Google News in columns for each day. You can scroll down to see more stories or, of course, can search for specific topics or keywords. (It also launched similar image search)
The timeline view gives you a snapshot of the major stories for each day, and you can drag the dates across to go back in time. It seems to favor Time Magazineand Wikipedia Events, although you can get rid of those results with a click. If you want to zero in on a particular topic, you can search for that term to see how a story has evolved over time. The timeline remembers your searches and saves them if you are logged in.
You can also switch the calendar to view stories by day, week, month, year, or decade. But why not by the hour or the minute? That is where Google news is weakest and losing out to Twitter search, in my opinion. Finally, to put a finer filter on it, you can search only news quotes, news videos, blogs, magazines, newspapers, Wikipedia, or various other sources. Maybe it could add a bias filter. → Read More
Can you name Google’s top ten products? If you look at how Quantcast ranks Google’s subdomains, you can get a sense of which Google products are the most popular, since they each have their own subdomain. Google’s main search engine tops the list with an estimated 136.6 million unique visitors in the U.S. Then comes Google Maps (36 million), Image Search (31.7 million), and Gmail (10.5 million). Google Docs, Sites, and Knol are still too small to make the top-ten, but are all showing decent growth.
YouTube and Orkut are not included below because they are on their own domains, but YouTube would be second with 70 million unique visitors. Orkut is not popular in the U.S., so it would not be a factor in this particular list. And I took out sorry.google.com, the domain Google uses to try to catch bots and spyware. It would have ranked No. 8. → Read More
Opera announced today that Google will become the default search engine in Opera’s mobile Web browsers on March 1 of this year. Anyone using Opera Mobile or Opera Mini can access Google directly from the browser start page. Opera Mini targets mobile phones that posses limited browsing capabilities. Opera customers tend to use the mobile Web more frequently and actively than consumers with more static, less dynamic mobile Web browsers. Opera Mini users brows more than 1.7 billion pages a month, with much of that traffic generated through the search function in the browser. Opera’s partnership with Google covers all global territories except Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States, and includes all of Opera’s standard mobile Web browsers. “Google and Opera have established a valuable relationship over the years and we look forward to continued collaboration on mobile products,” said Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera. “With 2008 poised to be the year the mobile Web goes mainstream, Google and Opera are extending this collaboration to give our users immediate access to the quality and convenience of Google’s search results. We’re excited to extend this productive relationship and we hope that the nearly 100 million people using our mobile products will agree.” If you are interested in one of the Operas, see the links provided below. Opera Mini is a free service and Opera Mobile is available free for a trial period on select platforms. Opera Mini Opera Mobile → Read More
The world’s largest handset maker, Nokia, announced today that it will integrate the Google search engine with the Nokia Search application. This plan was released at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. Google search will be available in more than 100 countries on a variety of handsets. The first Nokia products to be loaded with Google will be the Nokia N96, N78, 6210 Navigator and 6330 classic. The combination of Nokia applications and Google search can “provide an excellent overall experience,” said Google Vice President Vic Gundotra. He added that the “fast, relevant and comprehensive search experience” will be familiar to people who use Google to search the Web from their desktop. The deal doesn’t make Google the exclusive search engine on the Nokia phones. An analyst with the research firm IDC noted that the on-device search is controlled by Nokia. When a user wants to search the Net, Google appears along with Yahoo and Microsoft Live Search. But those who are used to using Google on their PCs may be more likely to use Google on their Nokia phones. “Nokia is only allowing all of these search engines to compete on a Nokia device, said Chris Hazelton, IDC analysis. “Nokia still maintains the platform ownership.” This is where Nokia wants to be, Hazelton said. It is the world’s leading mobile-device manufacturer, he added, “but they want to transform themselves into a software and services company, because that’s where they see the future going.” This move makes it easier for both companies to utilize Google’s open-source platform, Android. Google wants to get its platform on as many mobile devices as it can and Nokia wants to be able to provide its customers with software applications without investing money in a competing platform. → Read More
Topix has made a name by aggregating tens of thousands of local news sources and aggregating them online (they also like citizen journalists). It was only a matter of time before Google expanded their news product to compete more directly with Topix. That time has come – today Google added an option for customized local news to its Google News service. The localization option is now available on news.google.com, but does not seem to have been rolled out to country specific news portals as yet. Using the service is as simple as entering your post/ zip code or location into the Local News option box that now appears automatically when you visit Google News. The feature pulls news stories based on your location, and are presented as a sub-section on the main Google News page, and have a sidebar menu entry and dedicated page as well. According to Google: As always, results will be clustered with multiple sources on a story. The top stories for a given area will be at the top of your results. Our article rankings will also take into account a publication’s location so we can promote all the local sources for each story. Google News attracts a far larger audience than Topix – 47 million/month v. just 6.2 million for Topix (Comscore, December 2007 worldwide audience), but until now they have not provided good local news coverage. Topix now has some serious competition. CrunchBase Information Topix Google News Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
It is everywhere… advertising, and escaping ads and marketing campaigns might just get a little harder. But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing either. Because, while Google may not have invented online advertising, its efforts certainly brought ads to sites that wouldn’t have otherwise been able to sell any sort of banner ads or generate other forms of revenue. Now the mobile Web may begin to look a lot like the old Web. Google has announced the availability of AdSense for Mobile, a program that contextually targets ads to mobile Web site content. And there is money for those who serve up the ads too. The service allows ad partners to earn revenue from their mobile sites by placing the ads. AdSense for Mobile will be available to mobile Web site publishers in 13 countries including the United States, England, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Ireland, Russia, The Netherlands, Australia, India, China and Japan. How successful this will be, still remains to be seen. For one thing mobile Web users don’t just tend surf the way that users do on a PC. Mobile Web users look for very specific content, so the ads will need to be even more compelling to get users to click-thru. But for developing nations where PC penetration is small the mobile Web could be very enticing. This could be a whole new game for Goggle. Google Adsense → Read More
Google News has broken free from its temporal chains; no longer content to display search results from a measly month of prior news, the service has signed with a number of partners to offer news search extending back into early last century. According to PaidContent’s summary of the NYT coverage, sources include the Wall Street Journal, New York Times (to 1981), Washington Post, Time (full archives to 1923), Guardian Unlimited, Factiva, Lexis-Nexis, HighBeam Research and Thomson Gale. Some of the results will require payment to the source for access and there are no Google ads on the results pages. Regular search and timeline display options are available. The results displayed so far seem limited and timelines are hard. A search for Iran Contra, for example shows results only from 1987 through 1992, thus excluding coverage of the alleged deal between Reagan and Iran in 1980 that unseated Carter from the presidency. It’s only a question of history, though, there’s no need to get political. Almost every result for that search requires payment for access anyway. The official announcement should come on Wednesday, at which point the archive search option should be available from other pages on Google. For now though you can access it directly at news.google.com/archivesearch. For another look at archival news search, see our recent coverage of Topix.net, which offers less history but more sources and a more usable timeline. → Read More
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