Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales has announced the end of his ‘user-generated search engine’ project, Wikia Search.
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Category Archives: Search
Gawker: NYTimes falls foul of Google with IHT.com fold
Having folded the website of the international Herald Tribune into that of the New York Times, IHT story links now redirect to a generic landing page – denying the Times extra Google juice and frustrating users.
Hitwise: Google News dominated by celebrity search
Searches for celebrity or entertainment topics accounted for the largest proportion of Google News searches over the last 12 weeks (based on an analysis of the top 300 generic search terms sending traffic to the site), according to Hitwise.
The search term ‘jade goody’ accounted for 2.6 per cent of the UK’s site traffic.
CounterValue: Sun buys Natasha Richardson as sponsored link
Spotted by Justin Williams – The Sun has purchased ‘Natasha Richardson’ as Google keywords, following the death of the actress.
As raised when the Guardian mistakenly bought the search terms ‘Madeleine McCann’, how much is too much when it comes to search engine marketing?
Cyberjournalist.net: How Hearst Magazine increased traffic 150% with SEO
CJ talks to senior SEO analyst for Hearst, Dan Roberts, about how he helped grow online traffic to the publisher’s website by 150 per cent using SEO and Wordtracker.
Telegraph.co.uk: Google’s UK chief Matt Brittin on the UK media industry
“It is easy for people in traditional media to look at the internet and say, ‘Oh God, the internet is taking away our readers and advertisers’. But – and I want to be really clear about this – it is not Google that is taking advertisers away. It is consumers changing their behaviour,” says former Trinity Mirror man.
Google ends Radio Ads scheme – cites same reasons as Print ads closure
After the search giant announced the end of its Print Ads scheme, Journalism.co.uk contacted Google about the future of its audio and TV ad initiatives.
Would they be affected? A resounding no from the Google spokesman.
Well, yesterday Google announced it will be closing its Radio Ads programme – citing similar reasons to the print scheme closure:
“While we’ve devoted substantial resources to developing these products and learned a lot along the way, we haven’t had the impact we hoped for.”
Instead Google will focus on online audio streaming and advertising around this, phasing out the existing audio ads by May 31 and selling Google Radio Automation – the software that automates broadcast radio programming.
Up to 40 staff involved with the project are expected to lose their jobs, said Susan Wojcicki, vice-president of product management, in the blog announcement.
Google News Blog: How to help Google news crawl your site
Keep original content separate from press releases and format your images properly – just two tips from the Google News team.
Ten things every journalist should know in 2009
1. How to use Twitter to build communities, cover your beat, instigate and engage in conversations.
2. How to use RSS feeds to gather news and manage them using filtering techniques (basic or advanced).
3. That there is a difference between link journalism and ‘cut and paste’ journalism (aka plagiarism).
4. That your readers are smarter than you think. In fact, many are smarter than you – they know more than you do.
5. That churnalism is much easier to spot online. If you do this regularly, your readers are already on to you – merely re-writing press releases without bringing anything to the table no longer cuts it.
6. Google is your friend. But if you are not using advanced search techniques, you really have no idea what it is capable of.
7. You do not have to own, or even host, the technology to innovate in journalism and engage your readers. There is a plethora of free or cheap tools available online, so there is no excuse for not experimenting with them.
8. Multimedia for multimedia’s sake rarely works, and is often embarrassing. If you are going to do it, either do it well enough so it works as a standalone item or do it to complement your written coverage – for example, add a link to the full sound file of your interview with someone in your article, or a link to the video of someone’s entire speech at an event. The latter will enhance the transparency of your journalism too. Great tips and resources here and some useful tips on doing video on a budget.
9. How to write search engine friendly journalism. Old school thinking about headline writing, story structure etc no longer applies online and there is also more to learn about tagging, linking and categorisation. Sub-editors (if you still have them), editors and reporters all need to know how to do this stuff.
10. Learn more about privacy. You can find a lot of information about people online, especially via social networking sites, but think carefully about the consequences. And bear in mind that it cuts both ways, if you do not do it carefully, your online research could compromise your sources.
Update: see Ten things every journalist should know in 2010
French publishers vs Google: ‘You are becoming our worst enemy’
The headline quote comes from a round-up up by Eric Scherer of a meeting involving French newspaper and magazine publishers and Google. The meeting suggests some heavy anti-Google feeling on the publishers’ part.
According to one executive at the event, magazine and newspaper publisher Lagadère is on the brink of reporting Google to the EU Commission for ‘predatory practices’.
Watch the video below (courtesy of Adrian Vanachter Damien Van Achter of Scherer’s tweeted coverage of the meeting and make your own mind up as to which party you agree with.
One quote that grabbed my attention, however, was newspapers reported remark: “You are accepting the end of news as we know it.”
Google, secrecy about its algorithms and dominance of the online ad market aside, is looking forward; newspapers are trying to protect and control what they perceive as news and the news business. The problems they are facing, some related to Google and others not, should show them that this self-interested attitude can’t be maintained and their perception of ‘news as we know it’ is out-dated.
Jeff Jarvis sums this up in a blog post reacting to Scherer’s report:
“This anti-Google attitude comes from an apparent sense of entitlement that we see clearly in France but also elsewhere: Google owes us (…) They – like other publishers and journalists – think a market should be built around what they need and that there is a fair share that belongs to them even though they did not innovate and change so those who did should rescue them. But as Scott Karp has said, no one guarantees them a business model.”