Almighty Link: What would it look like if news organisations blocked Google?

A timely post from the Almighty Link blog, following comments from both Rupert Murdoch and Google’s UK director Matt Brittin about removing news sites from Google’s indexing.

Does Google need news content? Kevin Sablan has some screenshots illustrating how the search engine relies on news items for its best results.

Full post at this link…

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#soe09: Google doesn’t need newspapers – but do newspapers need it?

Google doesn’t need newspapers – it’s official; but its users do, Matt Brittin, UK director of Google, told the Society of Editors conference today.

Some key points from Brittin:

• “Taking content out of Google news is a political statement (…) but experimentation is good.”
• “One of the reasons we’re working with a lot of publishers is because we passionately believe that the internet needs to have quality content on it.”
• “Does Google need news content to survive in this year? No (…) Economically it’s not a big part of how we generate revenue, but the value of the internet to consumers is all about finding great content online.”
• “We’re a technology company and we’ll try and contribute technology that helps [e.g. Fast Flip, micropayment system] (…) We’re absolutely not [a newspaper company].”

The audio below features Times editor James Harding (first), Evening Standard editor Geordie Greig, and The National editorial director Martin Newland with their opinions on removing content from Google News:

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Mumbrella: Murdoch to remove sites from Google’s index?

Following his comments last month in which he described aggregators as ‘kleptomaniacs’ and ‘plagiarists’, Rupert Murdoch has suggested News Corp could remove its sites from Google’s index.

Speaking in an interview with Australia’s Sky News (video below): “I think we will [remove our content from Google's index]. But that’s when we start charging.”

As Mumbrella explains: “Using the robots.txt protocol on a site indicates to automated web spiders such as Google’s not to index that particular page or to serve up links to it in users’ search results.”

In the interview, Murdoch also discusses what could be put behind potential news site pay walls.

Full post at this link…

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ReadWriteWeb: Google allows readers to customise news

Google has created a new way for its users to save customised news searches and publish/share these results with others in their own ’sections’.

“Custom sections directory, which gives users of some of our English-language editions the expanded ability to create comprehensive sections to put on their Google News homepage or share with other users,” says the announcement on the Google News blog.

Users will therefore be able to create their own news sections outside of those already offered by Google News.

As ReadWriteWeb explains:

“Part dashboard, part feed reader, and all user-friendly, this service promises to be both popular and useful. Users can create sections based on keywords and then publish their sections to directories for sharing with others.

“Multiple sections can be added to a user’s Google News homepage, creating a customized, keyword-based digest. this feature is turning Google News into the infinitely segmented, infinitely remixable modern newspaper; and with all the sources Google indexes, it’s just what users need. Unfortunately, it also deals yet another blow to suffering old media publications, many of whom aren’t too happy about the distribution of their content in the first place.”

via Google Enters Customizable News Dashboard Market.

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OJR: ‘Does your site really need to be in Google News?’

Just how important is it to get your site into Google News? Robert Niles raises the question on the Knight Digital Media Center’s Online Journalism Review.

“For many online publishers, affiliated with newspapers or not, the Holy Grail of traffic is inclusion in the Google News index.

(…)

“But is inclusion in that index or other search engines’ news indices really worthwhile for the majority of online news publishers? I’m going to argue… no. (Well, at least it’s not worth making a fuss over.)”

Full post at this link…

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BBC launches Democracy Live with ’speech-to-text’ search

BBC has launched its new political site, Democracy Live, with technology that allows users to search video by text.

“Democracy Live is the BBC’s new website which offers live and on demand video coverage of the UK’s national political institutions and the European Parliament. Alongside the video, we have guides to how the different institutions work and who sits in them. Our search engine is a BBC ‘first’ – it uses speech-to-text to take you straight to your points of interest in the video.

(…)

“Our Search is one of the most innovative aspects of Democracy Live. It works by using a ’speech-to-text’ system. After a video is made available to watch again, our system adds words spoken in the video to for you to search on. When it finds a word you’ve asked for, it gives you a link straight to point in the video where the word is spoken. You can also search for representatives by name, place and postcode.”

Full guide at this link…

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Nieman Journalism Lab: Google News and the ‘blog’ label

So what’s a blog and does it matter? Google News has started – arbitrarily it seems – applying the ‘(blog)’ label to some sites and not others.

It’s all a bit weird, says the Nieman Journalism Lab’s Zachary M. Seward.

“On both technical and philosophical levels, there’s no meaningful difference between blogs that publish news and news sites that aren’t published as blogs. Many news organizations place material on both types of platforms without considering the content any different. Some use blogging software like WordPress to produce sites that look nothing like blogs.”

His analogy explains it brilliantly:

“Dividing content along these lines is like classifying brownies based on whether they were baked in aluminum or glass pans. There’s no difference, and it obscures what you really want know: if they contain chocolate chips.”

Full post at this link…

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#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – optimising your website for Google News

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paidContent.org: Interview with Google News’ Josh Cohen

A timely interview with Google News’ Josh Cohen, senior business product manager, following Google’s submission of a micropayment model for newspapers.

paidContent asks Cohen about publishers’ attitudes to Google, whether its become a scapegoat for the industry and about the search company’s discussions with publishers.

He also talks about adding more ’sources’ to Google News – following experiments with adding Wikipedia to the aggregator:

“As new, different sources for news and information begin to develop we will want to try to incorporate that as much as possible. What is a news source? It is increasingly grey. As much as possible we try to stay out of any sort of editorial or qualitative judgments. [The] aggregation of pubic information data – that certainly didn’t exist a few years ago.”

Full interview at this link…

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