Category Archives: Search

Study of French news sites: Facebook sends 13 times more referrals than Twitter

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Facebook sends 13 times more click-throughs than Twitter to French news sites, according to a recent study.

The AT Internet Institute research reports that Twitter was responsible for just 0.1 per cent of referrals to the country’s top 12 news websites, compared to Facebook which sent 1.3 percent.

By taking the same number of websites into consideration, Google’s share was 40.6 per cent in France, in other words 30 times greater than Facebook. This figure remains high, but we should not forget that the main function of a search engine, such as Google, is to suggest links to Internet users. This is not the case for Facebook. Moreover, on average for French news websites, Facebook generated more traffic (1.3 per cent) than the search engine known as Bing (0.8 per cent).

The French study looked at the average share of visits from 6th to 12th September.

According to its own report on the figures, paidContent:UK said Facebook was rated as the seventh “referral giver” to UK newspaper websites by the Newspaper Marketing Agency in May.

Reuters: Google forced to pay €5,000 damages to former convict over search suggestions

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Google has been ordered by a French court to pay €5,000 damages to a former convict after the search engine suggested words including “rape”, “rapist” and “prison” when his name was typed.

According to the report, the claimant, who has not been named, served time in prison after being convicted of corrupting a minor.

Google has said it will appeal the decision, which was published earlier this month, according to Reuters’ report.

The man argued that the words produced by the suggestion function on the search engine were damaging to his reputation.

Full story from Reuters at this link…

Will Google News build filters for ‘content farms’?

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CNET’s interview with Krishna Bharat, the engineering head behind Google News, suggests the search company is going to change its approach to so-called “content farms” and networks of sites like Demand Media or Associated Content:

Bharat implied that Google is working on a way to refine the signals it uses to rank news stories in a way that filters out the most egregious examples of news spam without branding certain companies as offenders because of certain stories. “What we are very sensitive to is user experience, but we don’t want to be anecdote driven, we want to be sensitive to statistically relevant feedback,” he said.

Full interview on CNET at this link…

Bloomberg providing news content to Yahoo Finance

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The Business Insider has spotted that Bloomberg appears to have started to provide its news content on the Yahoo Finance site.

According to BI’s report, a Yahoo spokesperson confirmed that the company has added Bloomberg.com content to its financial news portfolio. Business Insider adds that this is one of many deals to increase the site’s original content.

Yahoo Finance, which has content deals with dozens of financial news sites (including Business Insider), also is in the process of ramping up its original content. The site just poached outgoing Newsweek economics editor Dan Gross, and is looking for an editor to head up a new financial news blog.

Media Notes: Is journalism becoming a popularity contest?

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The battle to increase audiences is hardly a new challenge facing the media environment. Whether print readers, radio listeners or television viewers, it has generally been a case of the more the merrier.

In the world of online journalism, where there is instant access to page view and retweet counters, the ‘success’ of a story has perhaps come to be defined by these metrics. Howard Kurtz, columnist for the Washington Post, has an interesting post on the site this morning discussing the potential impact of this environment on the work of online journalists and the resulting balancing act between appealing to the search engine and maintaining a quality brand.

Naturally, those who grew up as analog reporters wonder: Is journalism becoming a popularity contest? Does this mean pieces about celebrity sex tapes will take precedence over corruption in Afghanistan? Why pay for expensive foreign bureaux if they’re not generating enough clicks?

Doesn’t all this amount to pandering?

Potentially, sure. But news organizations such as the Post and the Times have brands to protect. They can’t simply abandon serious news in favor of the latest wardrobe malfunction without alienating some of their longtime readers. What they gain in short-term hits would cost them in long-term reputation.

See his full post here…

Daily Mail hides SEO job ad in search crawler file

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It’s possible that SEO types have a sense of humour. Evidence comes courtesy of the Daily Mail, which has hidden a job advert for an SEO manager inside a file that should only really be read by search engine crawlers.

The job ad was discovered by eagle-eyed SEO man Malcolm Coles in a robot.txt file, which blocks the crawlers from indexing certain parts of the site.

Disallow: /home/ireland/
Disallow: /home/scotland/

# August 12th, MailOnline are looking for a talented SEO Manager so if you found this then you’re the kind of techie we need!
# Send your CV to holly dot ward at mailonline dot co dot uk

# Begin standard rules
# Apply rules to all user agents updated 08/06/08
ACAP-crawler: *

Very clever. People who don’t read these kind of things need not apply, obviously.

Concern over search algorithms promoting ‘content farm’ news

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The ability of search engine algorithms to measure the relevance and quality of content has come under scrutiny recently, following criticisms that Google is placing so called ‘content farm’ articles at the top of news searches.

Emma Heald writes on the EditorsWebLog that where SEO content directly competes with news content there is “cause for concern”, both for news publishers and the wider issue of public knowledge.

But the challenge of ensuring online news search results are based on relevant and ‘quality’ sources should be one taken up by the news aggregators, rather than content farms, which have a place in the online arena, she adds.

Evidently, content farms cannot and should not be stopped from producing large volumes of content and it arguably makes a lot of sense to provide internet users with articles on topics which they are searching for. And not all the content is bad: some is written by experienced, conscientious journalists. Traditional news organisations should focus on improving their own SEO (though not at the expense of the content) and if it is to retain its position as a top news aggregator, maybe Google’s algorithm should become more discerning?

Professor suggests 24-hour delay before aggregators can link to content

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Suggestions for changes to copyright law posted on the Business Insider by a US university professor and lawyer have come under fire after proposing that the direct reposting of news content from a weekly title online should be banned for a week following publication.

The article suggests that declines within the newspaper industry could be improved if intellectual property rights were to undergo “rethinking”.

Using aggregators like Google and others, I can access essentially in real time the lead paragraphs of almost any story from the New York Times, the Washington Post, or indeed any other major news service. Not surprisingly, traditional print media publications are dying, and not surprisingly their owners’ online dotcom alternatives are generating far too little revenue to pick up the slack; why pay for any content when the essence of everything is available immediately, and free, elsewhere.

The writers Eric Clemons and Nehal Madhani add that one solution could be to apply a waiting time on articles before they can be reposted online by external aggregators, unless it is only in commentary on the work.

A first suggestion would be to provide newspaper and other journalistic content special protection, so that no part of any story from any daily periodical could be reposted in an online aggregator, or used online for any use other than commentary on the article, for 24 hours; similarly, no part of any story from any weekly publication could be reposted in an online aggregator or for any use purpose other than commentary, for one week.

But these proposals have been strongly opposed by online news sites such as Techdirt.com, who said the issues facing newspapers is not the fault of news aggregators.

Revenue from those publications has been in decline for many years — well before Google and the internet existed. The biggest problem many of the bigger publications faced was taking on ridiculous debt loads. On top of that, most of them failed to provide value to their community, as competitors stepped in to serve those communities. That’s not about aggregators.

Editors Weblog: Google CEO on telling people what to do

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Continuing the debate over how Google and online news publishers can, or can’t, work together in the future, Editors Weblog has a short article based on an interview between Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt and the Wall Street Journal.

The overall message is that the future of digital news will lie in using advertising to “tell people what they should be doing” and capitalising on the movement of news searches to other platforms – namely mobile.

Once again, Schmidt promises newspapers a profitable place in Google’s future. “The only way the problem [of insufficient revenue for news gathering] is going to be solved is by increasing monetisation, and the only way I know of to increase monetisation is through targeted ads. That’s our business.” Newspapers have always answered questions that people were not aware they had to ask, and they simply have to continue doing this to fit in.

Google recruits BBC head of development and rights

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Google has again recruited from BBC staff as part of attempts to encourage online publishers to make more of the media giant’s news platform, this time hiring the broadcaster’s head of development and rights Madhav Chinnappa.

According to a report by paidContent:UK, the position is likely to centre on improving relations between Google News and newspaper publishers as many continue to question the value of the site to them – as demonstrated in a debate at the Frontline Club last week, attended by another former BBC recruit Peter Barron, who previously edited Newsnight but now heads up Google’s communications and PR department.

It’s a new post, and a sign Google is increasingly keen to dampen increasing scepticism, from some newspaper publishers, regarding its attitude to content, and instead come to amicable arrangements.

See the full post here…