It’s back, the prospect that Microsoft might try to make Rupert Murdoch happy by offering a “get listed with Bing” exclusive deal. Later, I’ll revisit the topic in a coordinated fashion. But for now, I’ve collected a number of thoughts I’ve put out on Twitter, in blog comments and elsewhere.

First, I’ll point readers back to my post from earlier this month, Why An Exclusive Wall Street Journal (or News Corp) Deal Wouldn’t Help Bing.

I still suspect that News Corp’s most valuable news content of all its properties remains the Wall Street Journal. So what happens if the WSJ is out of Google? Nothing.

Seriously, nothing. Remember, for years the WSJ was NOT in Google, and yet Google grew just fine. Also, the WSJ seems to have been fine. Neither is crucial to each other.

What if all of News Corp goes? Well, what are we talking about? Shows like American Idol? I see a boon for unofficial sites with news about American Idol, if that happens. Just News Corp news organizations? I’ll quote from my recent interview with Josh Cohen from Google News, on that possibility of many papers pulling out of Google:

You have a number of different sources out there that are non-newspapers who are probably just ecstatic at the prospect of a lot of paywalls going up in a lot of different categories.

You know, pick a category. CNN, general interest news, for example, I’ve got to think, and I don’t know, I don’t know anything, I’ve got no insight into CNN’s thought process and maybe I’m wrong, but they probably get a ton of traffic and do a fairly healthy business on the online side of things.

Ideally, what the AP or Murdoch want is an OPEC for news. They want to control the flow of news through the pipelines they think their news cartels control. As far as they’re concerned, they (and only they) have tapped into news reservoirs that exist.

In reality, news is going to get out. Even if the cartel were solid and managed to all block Google (or another search engine), the news itself still flows.

That’s why you also hear noise from place like the AP that somehow, a damn needs to be built around those damn bloggers that are seen as hijacking the news shipments. As I explained in that same interview:

The other solution that gets floated out there, a sense that there needs to be either an improved “hot news” law or tighter restrictions on fair use, so that people cannot so easily summarize stories (such as when a blogger does highlights of a news story or when a mainstream news source summarizes a story from another mainstream publication).

Notice I mentioned how mainstream news publications also quote each other. Case in point, how the The Journal Inquirer in Connecticut has sued the Hartford Courant of plagiarism.

Another case in point? Let’s get close to home. The Financial Times broke the latest news on a Bing-Murdoch deal (TechCrunch had a similar report a week ago). Let’s say that the Financial Times was being like Murdoch, blocking its story from Google. Well…

1) I first saw the Financial Times story in a tweet from Business Insider, which wrote a summary of that story. Google (or Bing) wasn’t essential to me personally discovering this news, nor did I have to go to the Financial Times to understand essentials of the story.

2) I also saw Mathew Ingram tweet the same story, but when I tried to read it, the Financial Times declared I’d seen two stories already this month and couldn’t see more without registering.

3) Rather than register (I probably have an account, but being on my phone, I couldn’t be hassled to look it up), I searched on Google. There, I found the EXACT Financial Times article that is syndicated (almost certainly with the Financial Times’s permission) on CNN. So CNN wins my traffic on this day, not the FT.

4) But let’s say the FT somehow full locked down pesky news blogs like Business Insider and completely closed syndication. How else might I have learned about this scoop. Well, turns out the Wall Street Journal has coverage where it cites the Financial Times. Now, will Murdoch start complaining about how his publication is ripping off the FT, in the way he claims Google’s links to his own articles are somehow a ripoff (Google at least links to sources — the WSJ did NOT link to the FT?

Now to be clear, the WSJ said “according to people familiar with the matter” in the lead to its own story, which indicates that the reporters there saw the news in the FT, were actually extraordinarily nice in noting that the FT was out first with the news, but verified the same details with their own sources. So this really isn’t a ripoff case — but it IS an example of how the news that started with the FT hardly was locked down to it.

In other words, sure, there are news reservoirs. But anyone can tap into it — and competing publications (both mainstream media and news blogs), do so.

Meanwhile, Mark Cuban did a post on how smart a Bing-Murdoch deal would be. I left a comment over that dissected some of his assumption and why I don’t think they hold water:

Cuban: “They need the most popular searches in the categories they want to impact. Bing just has to corner the market on specific categories. ”

Say like shopping? Because Bing’s been doing that for about a year now, offering people cold hard cash money if they do shopping search at Bing — Bing Cashback. In hard economic times, when people nonetheless still need to buy, you’d think this should be bringing people to Bing in droves. And the marketshare growth from that? Not significantly moving the needle.

So news? News content that they will still find at Google in other ways is going to drive folks to Bing? Not convinced.

Cuban: “Or they can target to pay sites about mesothelioma and other diseases that ambulance chasers covet and pay huge dollars per click through, or other high paying PPC searches.”

Corner the market on mesothelioma sites? How do they do this? They payoff the first 10 sites listed in Google and say drop out, give up all that really valuable traffic that you’re paying nothing for, and we’ll give you 10% of that traffic (at best) plus some hushmoney that might not rival what you get off lawsuits? And by the way, when you go, there will be another 200 sites that are probably equally good to you that will move up. Because we can’t buy them all off.

Cuban: “Then consider MicroSofts first move on twitter…”

First move of what, three hours? Which gained them a non-exclusive?

Cuban: “their investment in Facebook…”

Which over the past two years has done more and more to open itself, and its content, up to … Google. Because you know, the walled garden still finds itself needing external traffic.

Cuban: “Which makes the public positions of AP and Reuters and other top news sites all the more interesting. One thing they all have in common ? They dont like the way google has treated them and they all need money.”

The AP has a deal with Google. They liked how Google was treating them when they cut that deal, well enough. They don’t like Google now simply because, it seems, they want to negotiate more money now that the deal is up for renewal

As for Reuters, president Chris Ahearn said in August that he believes in the link economy. No threats at Google at all. Instead, he blamed news organizations with problems on “Incumbent business leaders in news haven’t been keeping up.”

If AP pulls out of Google, I suspect Ahearn will be happy to take the traffic. If the WSJ goes, I think the NY Times will be happy to take that traffic.

Cuban: “Many, like Henry Blodgett on Silicon Insider correctly make the point that news from de-listed sites will eventually find its way on to other sites and into the Google Index. But after how long ? Without question there will be a lag time. Which may be all that MicroSing needs. You can get ALL the news you need on Bing NOW, or you can wait for it on Google.”

Well, maybe a few minutes? If that. Right now, Google’s indexing seems to routinely beat Bing’s. So let’s say the WSJ goes out with a story, something exclusive, and totally only reported out the WSJ.

Bing might take 30 minutes to show that story. Meanwhile, some news blog sees the story about 1 minute after it appears. They blog it. Google picks them up 1 minute later after they ping Google. So now Google’s 28 minutes ahead.

But hey, Google’s got a Twitter deal too, right? So you see the WSJ article. You tweet it. It shows up in Google within seconds.

Also remember that most of the WSJ (and News Corp content overall, for that matter), is NOT unique content. So Bing has to get ALL the major news organizations to play — and face facts, some of them aren’t upset with Google and figure they can monetize the traffic.

Also remember that much of the traffic to news sites isn’t off the breaking news but off queries over time. If you’re searching for a particular topic, it may be a key article that is listed in “regular” Google that’s generating visits. Pull out of Google, there’s another article there to serve the audience with a non-time sensitive need.

Cuban: “Google already has a problem in that they do a horrible job of blocking spam in their date sorted results. Removing valid results is going to make their date sorted results look even worse”

Which is why in news search, date sorting isn’t the default. Relevancy sorting is. And personally, in news search, I haven’t seen this spam problem of which you speak. If you’re talking blog search, different story (and largely non-issue given the low usage there). And when I date sort news stories for “murdoch” in Bing and Google, both seem just fine to me.

Next, just a few ironies that I tweeted about all this:

irony. murdoch pulls news corp from google. people using The Sun search powered by google can’t find news corp content

irony. murdoch pulls news corp from google. people using The Sun search powered by google can’t find news corp content

See, several News Corp sites offer Google search on those sites. If Murdoch pulls his content from Google, then he pulls his sites out of the Google results on his own sites.

Of course, he could eventually cut similar deals with Bing. And maybe he’ll restrict the use of things like Google Maps by various Fox affiliates and try to block all things Google from being used by News Corp.

Of course, as I also tweeted:

be fun if google blocked all news corp IP addresses from searching for “free” on google when researching stories, too

As my Do Newspapers Owe Google “Fair Share” Fees For Researching Stories? post explains, Murdoch’s news organizations regularly tap into Google search to research stories, unless they are somehow NOT like practically everyone else who searches. I’ve talked with plenty of News Corp reporters (from The Times, from the Wall Street Journal, from Fox News) who I personally know have used Google to research.

Will Murdoch declare Google verboten? Or what will he do if Google decides to block his sites. I doubt they would, but they could.

The could get by with Bing, of course. Perhaps they’d get by just as well. But his rank-and-file reporters probably wouldn’t want to.

Meanwhile, let’s also remember that virtually all major newspapers in Belgium opted-out of Google a few years ago. They sued to get out, rather than just using a super easy voluntary system. That’s because, in my view, the lawsuit was more about hopes trying to force Google to the bargaining table to include the papers for a fee

Instead, Google conceded and dropped the papers. Down the line, the papers effectively came crawling back asking to be reincluded. Belgian Papers Back In Google; Begin Using Standards For Blocking has more. So is News Corp’s content more valuable to Google than that of an entire country? Maybe we’ll see.

Also remember that just as Bing can do deals, so can Google. If Murdoch’s publications go bye-bye, Google might do a deal with competitors, say the New York Times. Murdoch will be gambling that Bing will pay him enough money to make up for the lost traffic. The New York Times might be gambling that the extra traffic would help cement their place in a new future, especially as they can always do a paywall and still be listed in Google as well.

Maybe we’ll see, if this all plays out.

Lastly (for now, I may update other thoughts later), I think it’s a really poor move for Microsoft to be trying to strike exclusive deals like this. It’s one thing to license content. It’s another to apparently overtly suggest that a competitor be denied that content.

Microsoft has a bad anti-competitive reputation. It’s also in the middle of trying to convince regulators both in the US and Europe that it should be allowed to purchase Yahoo’s search technology and effectively end Yahoo’s role as a search provider, leaving the space to just Google and Microsoft.

So a deal to lockout Google? You can bet Google will use this to argue to anyone and everyone that Microsoft is back to “old tricks.”

As I said, I’ll try to revisit this in a more comprehensive, coherent manner in the near future. Also see these past posts that provide more background and perspective:

• Would Someone Please Explain To News Corp How Google Works?
• Josh Cohen Of Google News On Paywalls, Partnerships & Working With Publishers
• Google’s News Experiments & The Quest To Solve The “Read State” Issue

Be sure to also see Techmeme for related coverage.

Hey news publishers. Stop acting as if your content only appears printed on dead trees and tap into the dynamics that the web offers. That’s a blunt summary of advice from Josh Cohen of Google News, from a wide-ranging interview with him on Google’s experiments with new ways of delivering news.

Cohen, business product manager of Google News, says Google has no ultimate solution for the future of news online. It does have a vision of a super personalized news product that tracks someone’s “read state” and keeps them constantly informed with updates. But to turn that vision into reality, it’s conducting a variety of experiments. Some will succeed; some won’t.

The experiments aren’t meant to compete with publishers. Cohen stressed that Google’s not a content play and has no “Hulu for journalism” pretensions. Google’s a technology company, he says, one with tech that it hopes news publishers can tap into.

For publishers to be successful in a personalized news product, they may have to consider the “Living URL” model of stories, Cohen said. Think Wikipedia, written by journalists. And think about how newspapers might learn from a classic Christmas film, Miracle On 34th Street, where sending your customers away might actually make them more loyal.

Below, you’ll find Cohen’s comments on these and other issues. It’s the second part of a three part series, from an interview I conducted last month. Also be sure to read the first installment, Josh Cohen Of Google News On Paywalls, Partnerships & Working With Publishers.

What’s Up With Hyper Personalized News?

Both Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Google vice president of search product and user experience Marissa Mayer have talked about the concept of a hyper-personalized news system that remembers what you know, finds what you want to learn about and would be as easy to use as flipping through a newspaper or magazine. It’s been raised as an idea by Google as far back as 2007. Is this real? Is it coming? Is Google working with publishers on it? Cohen wouldn’t say much:

The short really unhelpful answer is, sort of. I think if you look at a few of the things we’ve launched in the last month or so, and launched being a broad term for publicly available, you get a sense of how we’re approaching some of this.

Journalism Should Be Written For More Than Print

Continuing, Cohen spoke more broadly of the idea that journalism still largely acts as if it is meant for publication in a hard-copy newspaper instead of also appearing in the instant access, hyperlinked world of the web:

News online by and large hasn’t adapted to the medium and still is largely brochureware, where people are taking not only just the physical article that was in the paper and just putting it online but also just the way you tell stories.

It [storytelling] just hasn’t really adapted and taken full advantage of the medium. Beyond just the challenges that go with it, it’s a completely different way of telling a narrative. And so there hasn’t been that real transformation. As a result, you get a lot lower engagement online.

Fast Flip: To Combine Best Of Online & Offline

Cohen said that Google Fast Flip, launched in September, is one example of how Google is experimenting to combine the best of both worlds, offline ease of reading and browsing with online’s “smarts” that allow for personalization:

The premise behind Fast Flip is really a step in that direction of trying to figure out how do I create a good online reading experience that is engaging, that captures some of that browse experience?

Fast Flip is focused right now on a specific set of content, more of the longer form content that’s more suited to a magazine, which is why you can sort of get that idea of a custom magazine that you can sit back and browse, flip from one page to the next, and without having to take 5 to 10 seconds for each of those pages to load.

You literally have that offline browsing experience with all the advantages of being online, customization, aggregation, and all those types of features.

Fast Flip: A Test, Not Google’s Ultimate Solution

However, those who interpret Fast Flip as “Google’s plan to save newspapers,” Cohen said, are making a mistake. It’s not perfect. It’s a test, and a test that might not work for everyone or at all.

What it is, is Google’s attempt to try and experiment in one of those categories. I think Fast Flip has a lot of advantages for, and this is my personal view, a certain set of content. How does that work for all forms of news, for all forms of content, I think remains to be seen.

We want to put that [Fast Flip] out there in Labs [Google Labs, where Google releases experimental products]. We’re excited about it. I think the response has been really positive both from users and from publishers. But we want to test it.

I think we all see it as one step in that direction of what does a news experience look like? Could that be a Google-hosted experience? Can that take place on a publisher side of it? Sure, I mean yes, the answer is ‘yes’ to both those. But that’s, more than anything, it’s an idea of ‘Look, we’re experimenting with this.’

Continuing, Cohen explained that Google sees certain issues with how news is delivered online, has thoughts on how things might be improved, and that Fast Flip is meant to test some of those theories:

That’s kind of how we approach things. We go out there and test it. And we have certain assumptions that are behind Fast Flip, which the data will prove us right or wrong, and then we’ll go from there and either continue to expand it and see what’s working and what’s not and iterate on it, potentially blow it out, deeper integration into [Google] news, separate products. Who knows? We try and be as open as possible to letting the product and the users’ reaction to it drive that direction more anything else.

In fact, Google has just begun a small test of Fast Flip being integrated directly into Google News.

Google To Publishers: Can Our Technology Help You?

How about that laundry list of ideas that Google provided to the Newspaper Association of America, which approached companies it selected for ideas on how to monetize news content? Cohen said this wasn’t a specific plan but rather a list of off-the-shelf technologies and systems that Google already had which might be adapted:

The way that we intended it was a response to say, ‘Look, this is our thinking on the space.’

Continuing, Cohen explained:

“We really tried to map out how we saw that ecosystem working [such as news publishers trying to process micropayments for content], how some of the existing Google technologies could potentially plug in to that, and we could power a site in the same way that Google Maps can power your mapping solution. We don’t create content but we create technology, so how can you use that?”

After the document leaked out, Cohen said it kicked off a number of discussions with publishers wanting to know more. Focusing on the micropayment aspect, he commented that subscriptions can and do work, but an easy way to charge is vital

For a certain set of content, and for a certain type of publisher, subscriptions, not only can they work, they do work, for a subset today. Is it a panacea for all forms of content, simply to put in a paywall? Personally, I don’t believe so. But again, if there’s a set of content that it works for, you’ve got to have a technology solution that works.

If you’ve gotten over the hurdle of someone saying ‘Yeah, I’d be willing to pay for this, I’m going to take out my wallet,’ don’t have them go through 50 leaps to get there. Then it’s really doomed to fail.

Google News & Personalization

Cohen then circled back to my original question, about how all these news experiments relate back to a more personalized news experience that Google espouses.

“We always talk about delivering the right results,” he said. “So yes, Google’s working on this. What forms that might come out in, could it just be a better personalization of Google News or certain types of feeds you can subscribe to or custom sections that are there today? I think it’s kind of any and all of the above.

By the way, since I conducted the interview, Google rolled out Custom News Sections, a way to personalize Google News so that you can browse stories that match particular keywords you’re interested in. A form of this has existed since 2007, but the update rolled out a directory, so that Google News readers could share custom sections with each other, along with the ability to have more complex keyword matching.

Challenge Of Explicit & Implicit Personalization

Of course, Google also has personalization that learns through watching behavior. But both explicit and implicit personalization features have much room for improvement, Cohen said.

I don’t think it’s where we want it to be. Personalization is hard to do.

The easiest of those are explicit personalizations. Even that, I think, is hard to get right, because a user will come and make certain decisions or choices about the type of content that they want to see, and yet if they miss something because of the personalizations [that they did], it’s still your fault.

You know, ‘These are the sources I want to see, these are the topics I want to see,’ and then they miss something, and, ‘Why didn’t you tell me about that?’. And again, that’s with a lot of direct signals and instructions from the user.

Then you continue down that spectrum on the implicit side of it, of understanding my reading pattern, not only what stories and sources and topics that I’m interested in but also my experience reading those specific stories. And so I think Eric’s talked a little bit about this, the ‘read state.’

Read State: What Online Can Detect That Offline Cannot

Read state, Cohen explained as he continued, is a key challenge that Google feels online news faces, the need to figure out where someone has left off in following a particular news story.

Think about it this way. The traditional newspaper reader would get their morning paper, read some stories and be done. The newspaper had no idea what they read. So when writing updates to those stories, the newspaper was forced to assume you knew nothing. It had to get the most important breaking aspects up at the top of a story, writing in “inverted pyramid” style so that if a reader drops off, the less important facts are safely buried further down in the story.

Online papers could be smarter. They could understand what you’ve read, where you left off and keep you informed with only the new material you need, because they’d understand your read state. But online news isn’t written this way. It continues to be produced as if people are reading offline. As Cohen explained:

Every single day I have to put something out in the paper. So there’s an on-going story. Every single day I file another article. A deadline comes in, 6, 7 o’clock or whatever, I file it, and it goes out there because I have to put something out there in the paper.

As a result, often times you have to have a certain set of facts, even if they’re just one little update to that story. It generates a larger story either to fill space or because I can’t just put a quick headline update to it and link back to my other sources to it.

Part of the reason that you see that is, one, there hasn’t been too much innovation in the space. But also because people don’t take into account your read state. So if I know that you’ve come there, I can give you the full story, or I can give you a quick update, a bulletpoint summary. That’s another level of personalization that I think is not there.

Living URLs & Bringing “The Miracle On 34th Street” To news

In theory, the idea sounds great — this “Living URL” idea that Google’s Marissa Mayer has especially suggested, the story that lives in a single place, constantly being updated. But aside from current technical issues Google News has, where it can’t even handle stories like that (see Of Living URLs, Newspaper Rankings & California Fires), there are current business issues that prevent it.

For example, what happens when one paper reports on a story, then a different publication reports a unique and specific fact. You do you merge what the two competitors say together, especially when they often don’t want to acknowledge each other?

That gets to another issue, people not linking out. Publishers trying to be all things to all people, instead of a focus area, of whether it’s a regional area where it’s the LA Times and I covers LA or it’s a topic where I’m the Washington Post and I can cover politics or I’m the Wall Street Journal, and I can cover business…

My value is my editorial filtering. I recognize that if I send you off [my site], and I just put a link to an update, if I’m the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal has a good update, I’m going to link off to it, so that I know that this is a good source that tells me what I should be reading, even if it’s not on their own site.

That’s what’s going to set me coming back. Not because I’m trapped into their web site, and I have to know that all the information is coming from there. There’s a comfort level, there needs to be a comfort level, to send people out.

That’s certainly a Google bias towards this. Where our focus is largely on getting people off of our site, because we recognize if we provide value in serving them the most relevant search results, whatever it is, news results, that this is going to be a jumping off point for them.

Call it the Miracle On 34th Street approach to news. For those unfamiliar with the classic film, the Macy’s department store Santa Claus (who is actually the real Santa) sends shoppers who can’t find what they want to Gimbles, Macy’s archrival. While at first Macy’s management is horrified, they’re won over as a customer declares her loyalty to Macy’s for putting the customer first.

In my own experience, the mainstream media traditionally has not linked out. It’s more common where they have blogs, such as Bits from the New York Times or Digits from the Wall Street Journal. And among news blog, it’s very common to crosslink (my Blogs & Mainstream Media: We Can & Do Get Along post gets into this more).

Should Newspapers Become Like Wikipedia?

The Living URL / Read State concept also sounds similar to something that already exists: Wikipedia. Should papers all simply become Wikipedia-like, where stories about a particular topic reside on a single page that’s constantly updated? Cohen’s not certain himself and figures there will be lots of experimenting.

I don’t think we have that answer. That’s something else that I think we’ll certainly experiment with on our side and experiment with publishers directly. I think the concept makes a lot of sense. How do you put that theory into practice?

I know you played around with certain parts of it, and you felt certain parts didn’t work felt or not. That was like one take at it. There will probably be 50 different takes at it from a number of different sources….

I think everyone recognizes the value in an online world, of having that persistent URL and a single source to get all the updates on a given story. That doesn’t mean there aren’t changes that need to take place on the editorial workflow, on the product design and also on the search side of it about how you pick those things up, too, which I think you pointed out.

Is A Living URL System In Testing?

But does Google have something like this in testing, that hasn’t been put out there? What about all the rumors that Google has something in the works with the New York Times or the Washington Post? Cohen wouldn’t say but rather pulled back again to stress there’s no perfect grand plan system Google has up-its-sleeves:

I will say this. We are directly working with a number of different publishers. We talk about the monetization, but product and content creation as well, whether it’s a set of tools or a structure or do so.

There are definitely discussions we’ve been having. There was that story that was reported about these collaborations with the New York Times and the Washington Post. It took bits and pieces of a lot of these different experiments and turned into a brand new product that would be the “future of news.”

While it is accurate that we’re working with the Times and the Post – among others – about improving the online news experience and how Google might contribute, as with many things, it often gets turned into something much grander.

Google Unlikely To Build A Hulu For Journalism?

How about the thought of a “Hulu” for newspapers and other journalism outlets, where Google might compile all the stories together for publishers, with single monetization or a subscription basis?

Cohen didn’t see Google as putting out a specific collective solution but rather staying focused on publishing tools that publishers could use individually.

Broadly speaking, the area of creating platforms for content is something we do today, such as with Blogger or YouTube or Knol. These are all examples of Google trying to make it easy to put content online. That’s consistent with what we want to do,” he said.

But Fast Flip seems like the start of a Hulu. Or is it something that Google may license as a tool for anyone to use? Indeed, that might be its future.

“Fast Flip is a longer term vision. We’re not saying it must be hosted at Google,” Cohen said. It might evolve into something publishers can host on their own sites or customize, he said.

Spotlight Added; Newsmaker Comments Go – Learning From Everything

How about the new Spotlight section of Google News. What’s the purpose behind that, and what’s selected for it?

It’s been really successful with us so far. There’s interest from publishers that it has potential to give another platform for content that often doesn’t do that well with Google News, which changes hourly. It’s for long shelf-life content, the enterprise stuff, the investigative pieces.

And thoughts on things that have gone away, such as dropping the attempt to get quotes from newsmakers on stories. Disappointing?

I don’t mean this to sound too Pollyannaish. Google is trying to encourage itself as a place where you can have failures and think more radically about the approach to a product. There’s no sense that I have get this perfect or it will never launch.

The comments feature is something we killed, but we also learned something from it …. People are encouraged to ask ‘What did I learn from this?’ That’s what makes it interesting to work on the products.

Are there things Cohen particularly likes? Cohen said he was happy with many “under the hood” changes that he thinks help people better trust Google as a news aggregator.

I was curious if more people browse stories at Google or do keyword searches. Cohen wouldn’t give specific figures, but he did say that at a typical news site, he knows that searches tend to be in the single digit percentages. In contrast, browse versus searching at Google “is much more balanced,” something he didn’t think was surprising, given that ultimately Google’s a search engine.

Google News: Trying To Serve A Balanced Diet Of News

Finally, I’ll end this part of the interview with what Cohen said was the overall mission for Google News, to “educate and inform.” In particular, Google News is aiming to expose things you want to see alongside things you should see. Or as Cohen put it, “serving the vegetables as wells as the dessert.”

Next week, the final part of this interview, looking at how Google News determines what to show visitors.

Ten years ago today, I had the privilege of organizing the first ever search marketing conference. On this anniversary, a look back at how things were then and have they’ve changed in a decade.

In 1999, search marketing itself was about five years old. People had been doing search engine optimization to generate traffic from free listings as soon as search engines themselves appeared in 1994. People were also taking advantage of paid search advertising opportunities, though these were limited and primitive compared to what we have today.

While search marketing wasn’t new, a major event focused solely on the topic had never happened. Instead, search marketing had to make do with appearances within other conferences. It would get a single session at a tech event, or an online marketing show or during a web design seminar. I remember this well, as I often spoke on search marketing at these types of gatherings.

Nobody Puts Baby In A Corner

Search marketing was like Baby in Dirty Dancing, literally put into a corner. Chris Elwell is no Patrick Swayze, but he was a key person who helped pull search marketing out of its corner and put it on stage.

Chris is president of Third Door Media, the company I co-own and which publishes Search Engine Land. Back in 1999, Chris was general manager of Internet.com, the media company owned by Alan Meckler. Alan had started the Internet World series of shows in the 90s, then sold those off. Then he decided to get back into the events business again. Chris was charged with scouting out some ideas for shows.

Chris approached me about doing a search conference. What did I think? Was there enough material for a show? Did I think anyone would come?

Absolutely to both! I remember being at another conference at the time I got his email, and my head was buzzing with ideas. An entire day! Just for search! A chance to really stretch out and explore topics in more than the usual 45 to 90 minutes allowed for all of search marketing, when part of a more general show.

A date and place was decided, Nov. 18, 1999, in San Francisco. I drew up an agenda, invited speakers but really didn’t fully comprehend how big things really were until I arrived at the hotel the night before the show.

Industry & Community

There, I was stunned. We had an expo hall, with about 20 or so companies. I was focused only on the programming, so I wasn’t expecting the trade show portion. Companies with booths, banners, swag. Search marketing was indeed an industry with a real physical presence that I could actually see, for once.

It was also a community, and one that had never gathered en masse to meet before. That was also a remarkable moment for me, that evening. At the reception, people who knew each other only through online forums or mailing lists introduced themselves. It was typical for someone to give you a sidelong look, try to guess who you were and say, “Are you…?” Then there would be big smiles, handshakes and lots of talking.

The next day, the event itself began. It was the first show I’d ever programmed, and I packed far too much into a single day. We started at 8am, ended at a mind-numbing 6pm and often had no break time between sessions. I’ve learned the importance of rest breaks since then!

Morning Sessions

I kicked things off with an hour long talk called “Back To Basics,” where I did an overview of search engines and general ranking issues. Looking back on my slides today, there was much coverage of meta tags plus a heavy focus on human-powered search engines — directories — which eventually declined in importance. But then again, a slide with tips like this still remains surprisingly valid:

Page content remains important, as do title tags. Meta tags don’t help with rankings but still may help with descriptions. Of course, link popularity is no longer just “growing” in importance. Links are by far the most important ranking factor these days, I’d say

Shari Thurow followed with a session called “Designing Search Engine Friendly Sites,” talking about the need to build sites that can please humans and search engines combined. This was in 1999! But 10 years later, plenty of designers and developers still don’t get the importance of SEO and worse, can view it as something shady.

Buying Ads Before AdWords

The third session of the morning was called “Buying Ads & Placement,” where I had Darian SR Heyman, Catherine Seda and Dana Todd all speak. All of them were notable for ferreting out ways to buy placement against search terms when such opportunities were limited. And I do mean limited.

Back then, there were programs like “Start Here” at Lycos that put a single link at the top of search results with a minimum of text to entice the searcher. Ask Jeeves had a “Merchants Partners” program. RealNames was a keyword navigation system that could get you to the top of AltaVista, if you were clever.

GoTo — later Overture, later owned by Yahoo and renamed Yahoo Search Marketing — was only about a year old. You could buy ads there, but since it hadn’t begun seriously distributing its paid listings, traffic was minimal. At Google, AdWords didn’t exist. Google didn’t have ads at all then (though these started the next month, in December 1999).

We Loved Meta Tags (Well, We Talked Lots About Them)

The final morning session was all about meta tags. Shari returned, joined by Marshall Simmonds, who these days oversees SEO for the New York Times Company, plus we had usability guru Jakob Nielsen.

Marshall reported the findings of a survey on meta tags that solicited the opinions of I-Search readers, a popular email list about search marketing at the time (Kids, email lists were how we old folk communicated with each other before we could Facebook and Twitter and Wave. Now get off my damn lawn!).

I loved opening up Marshall’s slides and reviewing them with 10 years gone by:

That’s right. We were talking back then about whether it was helpful to repeat a particular word more than once in a meta keywords tag. There was also the ever popular “to comma or not to comma” issue:

Any wonder why when I wrote an tutorial about the meta keywords tag in 2007, I started off by talking about how much I hated it? It was a pain in 1999, when it was somewhat important among various search engines. Over the years, it lost both importance as a ranking factor and was only supported by Yahoo. But that didn’t stop people from worrying about it.

Just last month at our SMX East conference, Yahoo said it had dropped that support. Sadly, further testing proved that wasn’t the case. But I remain hopeful it will finally die, relieving Google from having to do further videos about how they really don’t use the tag, so please people, stop suing each other over it.

Doorway Pages & Cloaking

After lunch, sessions resumed with a panel on Doorway Pages and issues on cloaking. Doorway pages and cloaking? Talking about spam at the search marketing industry’s first conference!

Yes and no. Not all the search engines at the time had rules banning doorway pages (a page designed expressly to get a higher ranking). Nor did they all ban cloaking (a method of showing a user something different than what a search engine sees, especially useful for hiding the content of doorway pages that weren’t exactly human-friendly).

The first time I’d seen a doorway page, I scratched my head about why anyone would build one. My coverage of search marketing focused on advice for people who had solid content sites. Why would someone make standalone pages like these? But DR Peck — who was on this panel — had made a bit of search history by using doorways to get traffic for his third-party clients. When I saw these, and wrote an article about how they were driving traffic for State Farm at the then-popular Infoseek search engine, the company came back with a “legit” ruling.

John Heard was also on the panel, a legendary figure for creating one of the first industrial-strength cloaking tools, which had a database that could detect when a request came from a search engine versus an ordinary visitor. I actually used his database once. To spam? No. To help detect search engine company employees that were spamming votes in search awards that I was overseeing.

Also on the panel were Fredrick Marckini, a founding figure in search marketing whose company iProspect was later sold to Isobar, and Brad Byrd of NewGate, another pioneer in doorways and paid inclusion opportunities.

Over time, more and more search engines came out against cloaking and doorways. I ran panels on the topic for a few years longer, not to instruct but more to inform search marketers of what competitors might be doing and educated them to the dangers if they chose to go that route. Typically, these developed into a more debate format. And in end, they got dropped altogether.

The Futility Of Submission

Next, I returned to speak in a short session called “Proper Submitting,” talking about the best way to submit to Yahoo and other human-powered directories. A submission to these places, if not done properly, could haunt you (and hinder you) for years. Unlike crawler-based search engines, there was no revisiting and constant updating of your information.

I also offered tips on dealing with the crawlers. We didn’t have things like Sitemaps back then, a common standard to inform search engines of the URLs you want to have spidered. We had Add URL forms, where we submitted URLs one-by-one. And we liked it. Or, we didn’t, because using those forms didn’t really help that much and grew less effective over time.

Nightmare Scenario: OMG, They Killed Yahoo!

In the late afternoon, it was time for the session I was most nervous about, “Dealing With Directories.” In particular, I had no idea what would happen to the Yahoo representative on the panel.

You know today, how Google is seen by some as this big, bad all-powerful gatekeeper of the web? Yeah, that was Yahoo in 1999.

Seriously, Yahoo was hated by many site owners because of its sluggish submission system. Or because of how an editor at Yahoo might change a word in your description on a whim, killing your traffic. Complaints were so bad that I’d done an entire special report on Yahoo submission problems two years before. Those select few search marketers who had learned the ultra-secret password to submit via the Yahoo “priority queue” protected that from the unworthy like an infant child. Yahoo had so many issues that it even generated a rival, the Open Directory.

The panel wasn’t just about Yahoo. Paul Wood from the Snap directory was on it, along with I believe Kate Wingerson from Looksmart, which was a bigger search player back then. Chris Tolles, now of news search engine Topix, was a cofounder of the Open Directory and got plenty of laughs then and in future appearances for his needling of Yahoo.

Then there was Yahoo. I barely got someone from Yahoo on the panel. I’d asked and asked, and followed-up and followed up. Eventually the corporate PR folks told me that sadly, no one was available. No one from Yahoo, out of a staff of over 100 editors, could make the short drive up from Silicon Valley to San Francisco.

I fell back to a personal contact, Andy Gems, a Yahoo producer who I knew online, from when we connected through a submission issue I was dealing with. I told him Yahoo wouldn’t send anyone to the show. Bless his heart, Andy came out himself.

After the formal presentations, we took the first question. I didn’t know what to expect. I’d joked with the search engines that I was prepared to jump in front of an angry mob and save them, if the crowd turned ugly. They didn’t realize I was only half-joking.

Maybe I’m silly, but I still get goosebumps and kind of choked up over what happened next. The person started off with a statement. He thanked the search engines for coming out. He said, as I remember it, that it made a difference to him as a search marketer to know they felt everyone was worth their time, that search marketers weren’t just some type of enemy to be fought.

The audience broke into applause.

After the session, Andy in particular was swamped with people who came up to him raising issues and looking for help. He had a stack of business cards, and he was thrilled. He thought it was great and said he couldn’t wait to get back to Yahoo to help all those people.

The Rise Of Google

The day ended with “Meet The Search Engines,” where we had a panel of speakers from the crawler-based search engines.

Doug Cutting of Excite, who later went to Yahoo and this year, to Cloudera, spoke. Jan Pedersen, now chief scientist for core search at Microsoft / Bing, represented Infoseek. Paul Gauthier, co-founder of Inktomi, took part, as did Andrei Broder of AltaVista, who is now at Yahoo. The panel also included a small search engine at the time called Google, with cofounder Sergey Brin representing it.

Consider the companies again that I’ve named on this panel:

• AltaVista
• Excite
• Infoseek
• Inktomi
• Google

These were all major players in the search space. Today, the first four are gone. Sure, AltaVista, Excite and Infoseek (now Go) all have sites that let you search. But they’re powered by someone else, and they have tiny amounts of traffic. Inktomi, sold to Yahoo and incorporated into Yahoo’s technology, will get absorbed by Microsoft.

Of the five players on this original search engines panel, it was the upstart, the second-mover, Google, that unseated all of its competitors. And not just its crawler-based competitors. The human-powered directory space had been growing. But Google’s improved relevance meant you could have crawling and relevancy that rivaled that of a human-curation. Google killed the directories, as well. And Microsoft — Google’s chief rival in spirit and soon, if the Yahoo search deal goes through, in traffic, is a third-mover not even on the scene at the time.

Sergey Brin & Not Believing In Spam

While the agenda listed Larry Page as speaking, Sergey was also there. He either joined Larry or replaced him at the last minute. Some conference veterans remember how Sergey rollerskated on stage. Actually, he did that a year later, joking about new Google technologies and demoing his shoes with pop-out wheels.

What was memorable about his first appearance was his now famous statement that Google didn’t believe in spam. He said during the discussion:

Google’s slightly different in that we never ban anybody, and we don’t really believe in spam in the sense that there’s no mechanism for removing people from our index. The fundamental concept we use is, you know, is this page relevant to the search? And, you know, some pages which, you know, they may almost never appear on the search results page because they’re just not that relevant.

How times have changed. These days, Google devotes significant resources to removing spam from its index. It not only has mechanisms to do this, but it even has mechanisms for those banned to request reinclusion.

But at the time, it was true. Google was largely spam-free, compared to its competitors. In fact, as Sergey made these remarks, the other more established engine reps all nodded their heads in acknowledgement that the link-based algorithm Google had at the time was very effective at fighting common types of spam back then.

And Since Then…

The first show concluded, and with several hundred people in attendance and positive reviews, it turned into a regular series called Search Engine Strategies. It grew into a multiple day, multiple track event.

Search marketers got another conference series when the popular WebmasterWorld forums expanded its informal “PubCon” gatherings that began in 2000 into a formal conference setting in 2003.

Then in 2007, a third event series was born. I left Search Engine Strategies that year, due to a contract dispute with Incisive Media, the company that bought SES from Alan Meckler.

People like Chris Sherman, Karen DeWeese and the aforementioned Chris Elwell — all of whom helped build the success of the original series — joined Third Door Media. We started over with a focus on maintaining the quality programming we’d always done along with an emphasis on a good conference experience.

Our Search Marketing Expo conference series launched its first show that same year, SMX Advanced held in Seattle, in June 2007. The show sold out and has done so each year since. We’ve also added two more US shows, SMX East and SMX West, giving us three per year — plus we run events outside the US, including Germany, Britain and Australia.

Beyond these three major conference series, there’s also any number of smaller “retreat” events, summits, training seminars, workshops and more. Those seeking to learn through live, in person events aren’t starved for choices.

More Memories

I’d like to call out a lot of memorable moments over the years, interesting panels and people who’ve made a unique impression at the various shows over time. Perhaps that will be for a future retrospective. Maybe I’ll organize the “SMX Reunion” show that I thought would be a cool way to mark today’s anniversary. Talk to me in 5 or 10 years! But I’ve already written a lot so far, plus I’m petrified that I might leave someone out accidentally (especially when I’m writing this fair early in the morning — it’s been a busy week already!).

Instead, some general reflections:

Search marketers are an amazing community. Over the years, I’ve constantly watched as veterans have welcomed newcomers into the space, offering advice and tips freely.

It’s been a real pleasure to watch people speak for the first time and develop into veteran presenters. It’s one of my favorite things, to give new people the opportunity to share knowledge.

I’ve been grateful when conferences been agents to promote change with the search engines. We’ve had summits and just general discussions during regular panels that have directly resulted in new features.

Keynote Memories & Finally, Ballmer!

One of the things I’ve tried to do with my conference programming over the past few years has been to get the very top people from the search companies to do keynotes. I felt such appearances really speak to the search marketers at the shows.

Search marketers have been the foot soldiers who have build the profits of these companies. They’re the choir that sometimes feels forgotten, singing their hearts out about search and still fighting budget battles against other forms of media that aren’t nearly as measurable, or which have far lower ROI.

When the top execs come out, the search marketers respond warmly. It says to them that they warrant time and attention. That they are important. They should already know this, but it’s always nice to be reminded in some way.

Google’s Sergey Brin did a keynote conversation with me in 2003. He was no longer the chief of that little search engine but instead a business rockstar who got swarmed by crowds, when the talk ended. People loved having him appear.

Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang came out for a keynote conversation in 2005, speaking on Yahoo’s 10th birthday and laughing that while he started Yahoo by listing web sites by hand, he had no desire to pick up that particular job again.

IAC chairman Barry Diller came in 2006, and before we took the stage, I’ll always recall that he appeared stunned by the more than 2,000 people in the auditorium. “Who are all these people,” he asked me — to which I responded, “Your customers.”

Later that year, Google CEO Eric Schmidt did a keynote that was a real pleasure, as he’s an executive that can deftly handle both high-level policy questions yet be versed in specific technical matters.

Microsoft has long been on my wish list, and I’m thrilled that Steve Ballmer’s going to keynote at our SMX West conference this March 2-4 in Santa Clara. It’s a great way to go into my second decade of producing search conferences.

Thanks — And Baby’s Staying Out Of That Corner!

I’ve chaired 41 search conferences over the years. I counted! But chairing an event is like conducting an orchestra. OK, I’ve never conducted an orchestra. But I know the conductor can’t make music alone. You have a team, and I’ve been fortunate to have great teams to work. My current team at Third Door is amazing, and huge thanks to them for all they’ve achieved.

Thanks also to the search companies who have taken part to support education at these events, to the sponsors and exhibitors who help make them possible, and to the attendees who are at the heart of all the effort. Thank you for coming to our shows. Most of all, my thanks to the speakers, moderators and session coordinators who give of their time and energy largely because they like to help others.

Finally, over the years, search has gotten more complicated, more diverse and offers more opportunities than ever before. There’s video search, social media impacts on search, rich search listing displays and much, much more.

If search marketing was big enough for a dedicated show in 1999, that remains even more true so today. No offense to other forms of internet marketing, but search still needs its own event where it can spread out and shine. It’s important enough to warrant that. I’m glad search got out of its corner, and I’ve got no intention of ever letting it get shoved back in.

Behavioral targeting (BT) has been the buzzword of the year for the last two years in the web analytics field. But is BT really all that important and valuable to the companies making use of it? The answer is usually yes. And does it take a team of PhDs to implement BT for a website? The answer is usually no. In this and a following post I will explain the value that behavioral targeting offers, and show how a marketer can make use of BT to make the website experience richer for users, and increase conversion rates.

According to Wikipedia, there are two principal types of behavioral targeting:

Onsite behavioral targeting is a technique that uses visitor behavior to target certain content that is proved to be more relevant to a segment of visitors. It should be preceded by an encompassing analysis of users and their characteristics (using web analytics tools). We can either define hard rules (for example, offer a special deal to anybody that adds any two or more products to a shopping cart) or use an engine to dynamically learn about and then target high-converting groups.

Offsite behavioral targeting is technique used by advertising networks to increase advertisement targeting. For example, Google is using this type of targeting to profile visitors to their website network according to subjects they like (their “interests) and then uses this info to provide users with targeted ads across the entire content network.

In this article I’ll focus on the first type of BT, onsite behavioral targeting, the type of technique used by website owners to improve user experience by delivering the right content to each person. Companies that current provide such a solution to website owners are:

• BTBuckets (free tool)
• Sitebrand
• Amadesa
• Omniture Test&Target
• SiteSpect

From tracking to behavioral targeting

Web analytics has been constantly developing since the 1990s. In the beginning there was data, and initially the struggle was to collect it accurately and provide reports on the state of websites, usually from an IT perspective. Then, with the turn of the millennium, analysts felt the necessity to turn numbers into insights, and the field evolved from simple data reporting to analysis. Today, marketers increasingly understand that testing is the way to go when it comes to design and implementation of websites (in other words, intuition-based decisions don’t really work well). Said another way, the customer should decide what works and what doesn’t (this phase is still rapidly evolving).

In the last two years, marketers, analysts and executives have started to understand that customers should get what they want without having to ask for it. That’s what behavioral targeting is all about: delivering the right content to each visitor to a website. It moves the current focus on overall results to segment results. It enables the website owner to understand which visitors are struggling and which are succeeding with their objectives. It helps marketers build more relevant campaigns to target the right market, be it through search, content, media, or emails. These insights and actions should not come at the expense of website testing, but in addition to it. Testing is very important to recognize the low hanging fruit that is ready to be plucked. It is also a great way to persuade management of the importance of investing in both testing and targeting.

Analytics guru Jim Sterne defined the benefits of behavioral targeting as follows:

“We can attract prospects with customized campaigns according to their interests, engage site visitors with dynamic content in response to their conduct and desires, and put the right message in front of the right person at the right time. We can create a more pleasant and more individual buying experience. We can quickly identify the offers that will more likely convert those prospects to buyers.”

However, the market is still not completely ready for this revolution. Recent research from eMarketer suggests that American internet users are not very fond of behavioral targeting techniques. As seen in the chart below, one of the conclusions of the research is that “respondents showed somewhat more interest in receiving personalized discounts and news, but still, less than one-half of Americans wanted any tailored Web content at all.”

Concluding, we can see a strong trend towards using behavioral targeting to provide web users with richer web experiences. But this will require a market education effort so that users don’t perceive companies using these techniques as not respecting user privacy.

In my next article I will go over a few examples showing how to implement behavioral targeting and analyze its results to increase website conversion rates.

]]> http://searchengineland.com/behavioral-targeting-creating-a-unique-experience-for-each-visitor-30015/feed 0 http://searchengineland.com/josh-cohen-of-google-news-on-paywalls-partnerships-working-with-publishers-29881 http://searchengineland.com/josh-cohen-of-google-news-on-paywalls-partnerships-working-with-publishers-29881#comments Sun, 15 Nov 2009 14:00:37 +0000 Danny Sullivan http://searchengineland.com/?p=29881

Want to do a paywall with no “first click free?” That’s fine with Google, says business product manager Josh Cohen. Want to do micropayments? Google will be “flexible” in considering support of new business models like this. But if you charge, expect less traffic, and also expect that your competitors will be “ecstatic” to pick up your loss, he said. Cohen’s comments on paywall issues were part of a wide-ranging interview I had with him about Google and its news service.

In the interview, Cohen also repeatedly stressed that publishers are free to deal with Google as they like. And if they wanted to exclude Google in favor of a competitor like Microsoft, they have that choice — though Google would prefer to work with everyone. Indeed, Google’s inclusion of many diverse sources is one reason he thinks Google might take hits from certain publishers that don’t criticize Yahoo News, which is a far more popular news service than Google News.

Below, you’ll find Cohen’s comments on these and other issues, along with a summary of how Google handles free, registration and subscription-based content. I spoke with Cohen in early October (a busy month in search has kept me from getting this posted until now). His comments are even more relevant given that talk of news publishers perhaps blocking Google have only ramped up in the past weeks.

Paywalls & Google Are Not Mutually Exclusive

As publishers increasingly consider putting up paywalls (a barrier to reading a story unless you’ve paid for it in some way), I also see commentary from others arguing such moves would be dumb, that they’ll be the final nail in killing some publications. What’s a confused publisher to do? For me, I find it puzzling publishers believe they have to make a choice. They can have their paywall AND Google traffic combined, via Google’s First Click Free program. Are there many publishers who simply aren’t aware of this program? Cohen responded:

Yep …. I’m often surprised, and maybe this means I’m not doing my job particularly well, but there are some basic questions on First Click Free and support for subscription content or the rankings or what we try and do.

Some of that are the challenges that you can’t make everything widely available. But we do try to be fairly transparent with what we’re trying to do within our algorithm on the Google News side of it, because we recognize that it’s important to different publishers. We want to be in a situation where the best content wins, not the best SEOed site. So if we can put that out there as much as possible and in essence give all publishers a level playing field, then the user wins.

If a publisher understands that quality, original content does best and therefore tries to create more, great. But there is still a lot of those discussions that take place where people will say … ‘I have to make this content free or Google won’t index it,’ and that’s not the case.

First Click Free is only one example of the ways that publishers can make subscription content available. They can do previews, they can block it in different ways. I think there are a lot of those questions about the nuts and bolts of how you can work with us, subscriptions just being one of them.”

Paywalls Don’t Require That The First Click Is Free

Of course, one concern with First Click Free is that it can allow a savvy person to effectively read your publication for free, as can happen with the Wall Street Journal. In fact, News Corporation raised this as an issue this week (My Would Someone Please Explain To News Corp How Google Works? article looks at News Corp’s comments in more depth).

That’s the first time I’ve seen a major publisher talk about issues with the First Click Free “backdoor,” but it was something I was expecting to come up, so it was on my list of questions I’d put to Cohen. Can publishers be listed in Google News and still protect their paywall? Cohen said yes:

You can allow us to crawl content and show a preview to the user and label it as a subscription. So that happens today. You can do that in Google News today …. as long as you’re not cloaking [showing Google something different than what a visitor would see, when they finally arrive at the page they've paid for].

You can also show a preview and we can index it, as long as it’s a consistent experience, where if you’re showing us a preview, and we can index that, and that’s what you show the user, that’s fine too.

How Google Handles Free & Paid News Content

In summary, here are the basic ways Google News handles news content that is free, requires free registration or requires payment to view. These are also described in Google’s help pages:

Free Content: Content is free. Google can index an entire story to make it searchable. People can find the story in Google and read the entire thing for free.

First Click Free: Content is behind a paywall. Google is allowed past and can index the entire story to make it searchable. People can find it in Google and read the entire thing for free. From that story, people cannot click to read other stories at the same publication for free (hence, the “first click free” name). However, people can potentially go back to Google, find another article from the same site, click to it from Google and read that.

Subscription: Content is behind a paywall [or requires free registration to read]. Google is allowed past and can index the entire story to make it searchable. People can find it in Google. They can only read the entire thing if they pay [or register].

Preview: Content is behind a paywall [or requires free registration to read]. Google is NOT allowed past to index the entire story to make it searchable. People can find it in Google only based on the preview content. They can only read the entire thing if they pay [or register].

And because I like charts:

Listing Method	Google Sees…	Visitor Sees…
Free Content	Full story	Full story, for free
First Click Free	Full story	Full story, for free, if they click from Google
Subscription	Full story	Summary. Must pay or register to see full story
Preview	Preview / summary	Summary. Must pay or register to see full story

Clearly, there’s room for improvement. Flagging content that can be viewed through free registration as the same as content requiring payment doesn’t make much sense. It’s also unclear to me if the “subscription” label means much to someone viewing search results. Perhaps “Pay Per View” speaks better to what they can expect.

The Preview option may be hard to comprehend for some publishers. It seems designed for those who are absolutely paranoid that they don’t want Google to index their content, even though giving Google only a summary story degrades the chance of performing as well in search result. The subscription option increases their findability yet protects their content from the general public just as well.

No Subscription Option For Regular Google Search

Note that the options above also are only for Google News. In Google Web Search, the Free and First Click Free options are allowed. Publishers can manually do Previews on their own. But there’s no option to show subscription-based content in Google Web Search, with the exception of Google Scholar content.

That’s a big deal. Newspapers get tons of traffic from regular Google web search. If they go subscription-only, they’ll lose that traffic. That might be fine for News Corp, which argues that the traffic it receives isn’t that valuable (despite, oddly, also purchasing ads on Google to gain more traffic). But the difficulty for Google in allowing subscription content into regular web search is that if the top results get flooded with it, uses may become dissatisfied and express their frustration on Google.

Open To Listing Arrangements

Some of how things currently work may change, however, especially as the news industry itself is attempting new business models. Said Cohen:

If people are putting more and more behind a paywall, it’s in both parties’ interest to be as flexible as possible around that, provided you can maintain a good user experience.

For us, we obviously want to be able to index that content in a reasonable way for our users. If we can find ways to be flexible in supporting whatever models come up next, whether it’s micropayments or whatever else that may be on the horizon, that’s good for us.

For [publishers], there is still a recognition that discovery is really important. I would argue even more important if you’re putting content behind a paywall, because all of a sudden, depending on your model, again, you’re potentially shrinking your potential base of users. So you want to increase the size of that funnel, you don’t want to restrict it even further.

That’s why we have those discussions with publishers. That’s why we work with the Wall Street Journal, the FT [Financial Times] and others with their subscription content because again, both of us are trying to do the same thing, which is make sure their content can get found.”

Subscription Content Doesn’t Rank As Well

Of course, while publishers are free to go subscription-only within Google News, they risk having lower visibility if they do so. Cohen explained:

The reason that subscription content won’t do particularly well in search results is just the user behavior. I’m not saying all information wants to be free and has to be free, but the user behavior is by and large that people don’t pay for a lot of that content.

If you have subscription content, the user response to it will in effect tell the algorithm this isn’t not a relevant result, I’m not clicking on this. By making it free or by in essence saying it’s paid but Google treats it as free [because of First Click Free], there’s a significant advantage to them, because all their content is indexed, and I think at the end of the day probably helps the results. People are more likely to link to it and all the different ways it can be beneficial.

It’s not that the Google News algorithm treats subscription-content as second-class just because it is flagged subscription. Instead, Cohen clarified, it’s that the algorithm tries to mirror what users like. Since they largely bypass subscription content, less of this is surfaced. I’ll also have more about the Google News algorithm in general in a future part of this interview (see the end of this story for more).

The Many Shades Of No

Cohen also stressed again that the choices remain with publishers. Beyond the Free / First Click Free / Subscription options, they can opt-out entirely from Google News or Google itself. They can also say no in a far more granular way than some like those backing ACAP (a proposed next-generation blocking and access system for search engines) would have you believe:

There are discussions saying ‘You’re stealing my content,’ but publishers have complete control on whether that content goes online in the first place. The publisher’s in complete control about the business model. If they want put up a paywall, again, publishers can put up a paywall. We don’t force you to make it free. In fact, we work with a number of publishers today who charge for content.

The other part of the extreme is even if you’re online, that doesn’t mean that we can come in and force you to index your content with us. And this is the whole robots stuff, where if you don’t want to put it in Google, or even just in Google News, you can block it, you can segment it or if you don’t want to show snippets. If you don’t want to show images, you can do that too. The publisher has complete control about whether that content is displayed. [By "robots stuff," Cohen is referring to the robots exclusion protocol, explained further below in this interview.]

We certainly hope people don’t opt out. We think there’s high-quality content, and we want to be able to index it, but at the end of the day, the publisher has control over that. So this sense that they have no choice but to be in Google, that they’re forced, that we’re breaking into their house and taking that print, digitizing it, putting it online and forcing it to be free …. There are so many steps along the way where they can say ‘Stop’ and we will respect that, 100%.

Build Your Paywall & Others May Go Elsewhere

How about the idea that newspapers all need permission to collude, to discuss openly banding together blocking all their content, because if they don’t all do it at once — or if one person stays out offering material for free — then collectively they all lose. From that comes a suggestion that they really don’t have a choice, that they have to be in Google. Cohen disagrees with this.

They do have a choice.  I think the reason publishers want to be in Google is because of the value we deliver.  There are a number of sources of information competing on the web today, so making sure your content is discoverable is by and large a good thing.

This idea that ‘Oh, so nobody’s going to read any other source other than what’s in a newspaper.’ Think about that for a second …. you have a number of different sources out there that are non-newspapers who are probably just ecstatic at the prospect of a lot of paywalls going up in a lot of different categories.

You know, pick a category. CNN, general interest news, for example, I’ve got to think, and I don’t know, I don’t know anything, I’ve got no insight into CNN’s thought process and maybe I’m wrong, but they probably get a ton of traffic and do a fairly healthy business on the online side of things.

So if all these newspapers go behind a paywall, I would have to think that somebody like them, who’s in a strong position right now, is probably going to take a different position.

Want To Exclude Only Google? That’s Fine

That led me to the other solution that gets floated out there, a sense that there needs to be either an improved “hot news” law or tighter restrictions on fair use, so that people cannot so easily summarize stories (such as when a blogger does highlights of a news story or when a mainstream news source summarizes a story from another mainstream publication).

When the interview happened, the AP has just suggested it might give its stories in advance to certain portals — widely interpreted that maybe Bing could get a head-start with news stories over Google. What did Cohen think of those lobbying for fair use changes and the AP’s push?

Cohen didn’t really answer the fair use portion, though Google’s been pretty clear that they feel what they do falls under fair use. As for exclusivity, he didn’t seem bothered if someone wanted to partner with people other than Google.

There’s a challenge over these existing business models. I think some of it is, these are businesses that had 20, 30 percent margins. And that’s probably not going to be the case going forward. I don’t see that just on the business side, forget both the cyclical and the secular changes to it.

Again the reality of it is that the publishers have complete control over their content on the web. Whether or not you digitalize it, whether or not it’s paid or free, and whether or not Google in particular has access to it. With robots, you can specify by user agent.

If you want Yahoo and Microsoft, and you want to do a deal with Microsoft, and only have Microsoft have access to your content and say Google, don’t index my content, you can do that.

The day after my interview with Cohen, Google CEO Eric Schmidt got asked about the AP news, as well, saying that Google had to be careful not to favor one publication over the other in terms of speed or latency.

Excluding Google News Vs. Excluding Google Web Search

One issue that came up with some Italian publishers recently what the suggestion that if you opt-out of Google News, you can’t be included in Google Web Search, which generally seems to send more traffic to publishers over time that Google News does.

So, the allegation was, if you object to being in Google’s news portal that you view as a competitor, you also have to exclude yourself from also being in web search results that you might not view as so much a competitor (see Debunking The Italian Newspapers’ Antitrust Allegations Against Google for more on this).

Not true. The reality is that you can opt-out of Google News but still be included Google Web Search. However, you can’t do this automatically. You have to request being dropped from Google News (which, by the way, also doesn’t automatically include anyone. Some human reviewer at Google decides to include a source, or sources have to manually request inclusion if they’re not already listed).

Shouldn’t the Robots Exclusion Protocol options (robots.txt files or the meta robots tag) used to signal automatic exclusion from indexing allow you to say no to Google News but yes to other Google search properties, such as Google Web Search? That’s not easy, Cohen said, but it could come:

We recognize with Google News, it’s very important to publishers to give them that option, if they want to opt-out specifically from Google News. We allow them to do that, simply by telling us to remove them. But as you apply to a whole set of different services within Google, it just gets hard to define what is the use that’s intended for a given service. That’s the main issue from our side.

But at the end of the day, we want to give as much control to publishers over their content as possible. So if that’s something that we can do in a way that works for users in general, there’s not a business reason why we wouldn’t want to give that control.

Google’s Inclusion Of Many News Sources May Draw Attacks

I also wondered why Cohen felt publishers seem to attack Google more when Yahoo News still outdistances Google as a leading news site by more than 3 to 1, not to mention that unlike Google News? In part, he seemed to suggest that ironically, it’s because Google’s trying to show a diverse and level playing field of sources. It includes a lot of publications and sends many of traffic to many of them, rather than a select few.

I don’t know that it is Google News versus Yahoo News. Probably, they view it more broadly as Google overall and Yahoo overall and getting back to size questions. But I can’t answer that. I’m not in a position to do so. It’s more of a question from the publisher side of it.

From the news site of it, this is not a value judgment, just Yahoo News and Google News have just different approaches and different business models. We’re both aggregators, but they’re more of a portal. Their focus is on creating a Yahoo-branded experience, editorial voice, business model [unlike Google News, Yahoo News employs journalists to produce original content]. They do send traffic to partners but a large part of it, that experience takes place on Yahoo’s site.

What we’re trying to do within Google News is around having as many different perspectives as possible on a given story and a diversity of sources. Also, again keeping with how we tend to operate as a company, our business model is about directing that traffic back out to the publisher’s site. It’s their business model, it’s their look-and-feel, their editorial voice. Again, I honestly don’t mean that as any sort of a value judgment. It’s just different approaches to the space.

Google News & Content Partnerships

Would it help if Google partnered more with content owners for licensing agreements in the way that Yahoo apparently does? Cohen replied that Google has “thousands” of partnerships. But to me, most these are down to AdSense, agreements to place Google’s ad serving code on partner web sites — where the “partnership” has little more to do with someone filling out a self-serve form. What about partnerships that cover the use of material on Google’s site itself, such as how Yahoo licenses out wire content.

Cohen said that Google has 11 partnerships like this of its own, at the moment. After the interview, I was sent the full list:

• AP
• AFP
• UK Press Association
• Canadian Press
• EFE
• Lusa
• Keystone
• APA
• PAP
• MTI
• ANA

A deal with the AP was made in 2007, followed by agreements with AFP, UK Press Association and Canadian Press in 2008 (see Google News Now Hosting Wire Stories & Promises Better Variety In Results for more). The latter seven listed are all members of the European Pressphoto Agency and signed an agreement with Google in March 2009 (see also here).

Belgian papers that fought a much publicized battle against Google in 2006 were reincluded in 2007. At the time, this was not due to a financial settlement (see Belgian Papers Back In Google; Begin Using Standards For Blocking). As they don’t appear on the list of formal partners I was sent, I assume there still remains no formal agreement for their inclusion. I also don’t see on the list a deal with Sofam & Scam, two Belgian photo and A/V services that joined the case after it started, got an agreement, then dropped out of the suit. So I’m not sure if this is still active — I’m checking on this.

Why Do Deals? Reducing Duplicate Stories One Reason

The content deals have been stuck for various reasons, Cohen said. With both the AP and AFP, those deals were designed in part supposedly to help with the problem of duplication of wire content on Google News. The same wire story might appear in various newspapers at the same time, which can confuse Google into thinking the stories are all different, when they’re the same. Said Cohen:

If you’re trying to show different perspectives, having 50 copies of the same story doesn’t make sense.

Continuing, he also talked about why as part of the deal, Google agreed to host AP articles on Google itself:

They have a different business model where the focus [of the AP's web site] is primarily on the B2B space. They don’t have a [consumer] destination. They don’t want to, or they can’t, because of the challenges that might cause for them with sales.

By sales, Cohen refers to the issue that the AP both gives its own original content to member publications plus take stories in from them to distribute to all AP members. If the AP creates a news portal of its own, it potentially competes with member publications for readers, using content from some of those members.

So with the AP, the existing deal was intended to help solve dual issues, that of Google wanting to reduce duplicate stories and for AP to have Google host its stories in a somewhat “neutral” environment that might be more acceptable to its members, since the AP couldn’t host the news itself.

AP’s Ranking Boost Quest

Interestingly, one of the AP’s top concerns with a new deal with Google appears to be that it wants to rank better in Google’s results. Unfortunately, the AP shows its ineptness in understanding search when it speaks like this. There is no way — no way — that Google’s going to guarantee the AP a ranking boost over other news sites.

Really, what the AP seems to want to ensure that if one of its stories is managing to get into the top results, that the AP itself gets the spot, not a submission of the story over at Digg, not a summary of the story over at the Huffington Post, not a copy of its story on one of its many member publications. As best I can tell — I’ve not had luck getting the AP to talk to me directly, but I’ll be trying again.

That’s actually more reasonable. In fact, SEOs have long been lobbying Google for ways to ensure that original source documents show up ahead of pages that simply reference those documents with little value-add (IE: news flash AP, this isn’t just your problem, and people have been actively working long before you to help solve it). One solution that came this year was the canonical tag, which is about to expand with cross-domain support.

Another solution remains with the AP itself. By not having its own news portal, by having stories that can disappear after 30 days, it constantly shoots itself in the foot to gain the links that would let it naturally rank better in Google.

Consider an AP story from October published with the AP’s cooperation at Google News, covering how the AP itself might want to charge some portals for early content access. Techmeme featured the story, as did several blogs like ReadWriteWeb and Mashable. By try to read the story they all linked to, and it’s gone.

For more on the issues addressed above, see these articles:

• What The Associated Press is saying to Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo
• Sorry, Tom Curley: Don’t Expect A Google Ranking Boost For The AP
• Hey AP! How About Running A Real News Web Site?,
• How The AP Fails To Get Search & SEO (Again)

But Duplicates Still Get Through

Back to the existing Google-AP deal. There, the de-duplication aspect hasn’t panned out as well as promised. It’s still possible to search on Google and encounter the same AP story being hosted by different newspapers. In addition, the theory was that if there was an AP story, it was the AP story hosted at Google that was supposed to get to billing, not the same story at members. Cohen acknowledged there are still issues:

We’re still indexing everything and showing the duplicates, but trying in the default results to show the canonical page [the AP story on Google itself]

Continuing, he explained there are challenges, in that what may seem like the same AP story in different papers might not be the exact same story.

“If they [an AP member publication] edit it or add original quotes, it begins to change,” he said. “There’s a gray area of trying to get that right and capture changes. We want to capture [and show] substantial changes but not have someone tweak a headline or byline and get listed as if it’s a different story.”

Still, it’s been over two years since Google began offering hosted wire stories. You’d expect these problems to be sorted out by now.

Not Said: Deals Stop Lawsuits

What the deals have been most successful at, at least with the AP and AFP, have been to defuse lawsuits. The AFP did sue Google; the AP threatened. Google said what it was doing with news stories fell under fair use and that the deals it cut were specifically for “new” and “extensive” uses of wire content that went beyond fair use (see AFP & Google Settle Over Google News Copyright Case for more).

Cohen reiterated this when I asked specifically about it during our interview. Google completely disagrees that listing a headline and summary of a story, with a link to that story, violates copyright laws as some publishers have contended. Nevertheless, the agreements got some wire services off Google’s back.

The AP Pushes At Google

The fires are being stoked again, however. The AP agreement is being renegotiated, and the organization has sent conflicting messages about how and when it considers listing articles to go beyond fair use.

The AP is also launching a “news registry” it says will allow it to track usages of AP content in part as a way ensure content is properly licensed (according to the AP’s view; others may disagree). Confusingly, on Friday, there came a report from Business Insider that the AP may want Google to maintain this registry (Google said they had no comment about this).

Meanwhile, an earlier project that the AP backed — the aforementioned ACAP — moves along with its own system of automatically transmitting licensing information, not that anyone is currently trying to actually license material in the way that ACAP-backers hope. Also on Friday, there came a report that from TechCrunch that Microsoft might try to woo publishers into blocking Google and get behind ACAP.

I’d previously talked with Google’s Schmidt about the business dealings with the AP, so see my interview with him for more on that (Google CEO Eric Schmidt On Newspapers & Journalism). With Cohen, I focused on more technical aspects.

Robots.txt Works Fine; ACAP Needs Progress

In particular, Google’s primary way of dealing with publishers remains the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP). With the AP having pushed two alternatives to this, is there a problem with REP? Will Google get behind ACAP?

The AP stuff [the news registry] is still so vague that I can’t talk too much about it. The ACAP thing, there’s a challenge with some of the specific protocols. A good chunk of it can already be done with robots [REP], and it already works.

Continuing, Cohen explained further:

That’s not to say there isn’t more than can be done [with REP]. To keep that moving forward makes sense. Some things they [ACAP] want to do, it’s not a question of being bad for Google but bad for the web that opens the door to a lot of spam. For example, a directive of what the snippet should be, that this is what you have to show. One guy said the whole spam thing is overstated.

You have to think about any protocol to work for the common web, not just news publishers. We’ve had these discussions. Unfortunately, we haven’t seen much progress there.

The lack of considering the “common web” resonates with me. As my Search Engines, Permissions & Moving Forward In Copyright Battles article explains, a weakness to me with ACAP has long been that it was designed by news publishers, for news publishers while search engines deal with more content than that. From my article, I wrote;

A new system to be developed with the search engines and a broad range of publishers for online indexing. That’s not ACAP, in the sense that ACAP had not specific solutions when it rolled out. Moreover, ACAP really represents the interests of a minority of publishers on the web, news publishers. Web publishers are online merchants and small bloggers and forum owners and those with personal home pages and B2B business and Fortune 1000 sites and local merchants with single pages and more. No, every constituency can’t be represented. But any new system needs more broad-based participation.

ACAP recently rolled out an updated specification (PDF); I’ll be looking at the system and how it weighs up against REP in a future article.

Don’t Blame Us; Blame The Internet

During the interview, I also remarked how I find it personally odd to see publishers upset that Google and other “aggregators” are supposedly taking away their visitors. For me and for others, these places are our newspapers. And while publishers might prefer we start our day with them, it seems unlikely for many that this will change. But it also doesn’t have to be a negative because these same aggregators accused of robbing visitors to me also seem to be exposing news content that many would have never seen before.

Cohen commented similar to what Schmidt has said before in my interview with him, that Google gets blamed for disruption rather than changes the internet itself as a new communications medium has caused.

Eric touched on this, in how Google is often seen as synonymous with the internet. And so anything good that happens, in the space, Google did it, Google did something, and we may have had anything nothing to do with whatever innovation was out there. And anything bad that happens is Google’s fault.

So this idea, the issues that publishers have around Google News. I mean if Google News didn’t exist or even broader, if Google didn’t exist, it’s not going to change the basic disruption that’s taken place within digital media. And in fact, if anything — and I certainly see the disruption that’s there and I can recognize that — but I think you also have to recognize that the train left the station before Google came to fruition. And Google is just a tool to help you navigate that. And the different properties are there that help you find that information in an increasingly fragmented space.

NOTE: Google’s News Experiments & The Quest To Solve The “Read State” Issue is the second part of this interview that deals with Google’s experimentation with news products; a third part will be out in late November that looks more deeply into how Google News determines what to show visitors.

]]> http://searchengineland.com/josh-cohen-of-google-news-on-paywalls-partnerships-working-with-publishers-29881/feed 1 http://searchengineland.com/obama-tops-for-who-is-failure-in-google-29788 http://searchengineland.com/obama-tops-for-who-is-failure-in-google-29788#comments Fri, 13 Nov 2009 18:35:16 +0000 Danny Sullivan http://searchengineland.com/?p=29788

I’d thought the googlebombs relating to “miserable failure” and “failure” had finally been defused earlier this year. Guess not. Ranking tops in Google right now, the official White House page for US President Barack Obama:

I’ve not heard of any active campaign to linkbomb Obama to the top for these words, so I’m guessing this is fallout from the long-standing “miserable failure” googlebomb that was impacting his predecessor, President George W. Bush.

Below, some key background from our archives:

Google Kills Bush’s Miserable Failure Search & Other Google Bombs from January 2007 provides detailed background on what googlebombing or linkbombing is. In short, it’s a campaign to linking to a particular page with certain words, in hopes of making the page rank for those words. That article also explains how Bush’s biography was bombed into the top results for “failure” and “miserable failure,” until Google put in a solution designed to disable all types of linkbombs (they weren’t trying to help Bush specifically).

Google Says Stephen Colbert Is No Longer The Greatest Living American from May 2007 explains how Google’s solution had a flaw. Rather than running automatically, it required that Google periodically run a linkbomb defusing algorithm. Or so Google said. Some simply felt that the “algorithm” was nothing more than Google making manual edits to remove new bombs, when detected.

Bush – Tops For “Who Is A Failure” On Google from February 2008 shows that Bush was ranking again for a “failure” related query, “who is a failure.” It turns out that this wasn’t a new thing. It was a consequence of earlier “miserable failure” linkbomb that hadn’t been detected, apparently — where changing the order of the words or adding a few more could trigger the bomb to blow up again.

Obama Is “Failure” At Google & “Miserable Failure” At Yahoo from January 2009 shows how Obama inherited the “failure” and “miserable failure” googlebombs from Bush, in part because Obama’s web team redirected visitors looking for Bush’s biography to Obama’s.

That was fixed, and the rankings went away. I’m not sure how long the “who is failure” search has been ranking Obama on Google. It’s puzzling, because his page is isolated from those past Bush links now. A quick rundown on rankings for key terms across the search engines makes things more puzzling:

Google: “Failure,” “miserable failure” and “who is a failure” bring up neither Bush nor Obama in the top 50 results, but “who is failure” ranks Obama #1.

Ask: “Failure” doesn’t find Bush or Obama in the top 50 result. For “miserable failure,” Bush ranks #45. For “who is a failure,” neither ranks. For “who is failure,” Obama ranks #1, as with Google.

Bing: For “failure,” the Bush bio ranks #2 for me. It ranks #3 for “miserable failure.” It ranks #2 for “who is a failure” and “who is failure.”

Yahoo: For “failure,” Bush ranks #11. Bush ranks #5 for “miserable failure.” His bio ranks #16 for “who is a failure.” For “who is failure,” neither Bush nor Obama rank in the top 50 results.

Overall, Bush continues to show up for failure-related terms other than at Google and Ask. With Ask, I suspect this is because they’re taking some of Google’s editorial results. Ask has denied this in the past. But Ask has also prided itself on how in the past, it stood above the other search engines by not showing the same linkbombs that would often appear elsewhere.

So if Bush is the failure based on link analysis but everyone else (or at least Google’s two largest rivals), what’s up with Google? Why’s this happening? Perhaps there’s new link data out there influencing Obama’s page?

Alternatively, it might be something that Ciarán Norris pointed out the last time I wrote about this. There’s still a link that might be transmitting “failure” credit that was aimed at Bush to Obama, at least in how Google counts things.

This was the page that originally was bombed:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html

It now does a 301 permanent redirect to this page:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/about/presidents/georgewbush/

Without the technical jargon, that means if anyone “calls” that original page, they get forwarded automatically to the new location — and search engines are told to transfer anything they know about the old page to the new one.

Unfortunately, in 2006, that “gwbbio.html” was also temporarily redirected here:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/

That page now does a 301 redirect here:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/president-obama/

My assumption is that some people who wanted to googlebomb Bush used the post-2006 “/president” address, which is still causing problems today for Obama, just as I was expecting might happen:

Of course, they [the Bush White House] had to do a redirect. Too many people had bookmarked the former address of the biography. But rather than redirect to the new biography page, they choose to point at the page used by all US presidents — Bush currently, Obama next and future presidents to come.

Aside from turning Bush’s search engine problem into a legacy issue for future presidents, the change is also misleading the US public and others. The redirection from the old bio page should lead to the new bio page, not require those using old bookmarks to guess at where the new location is at.

What to do? In looking at my past writings, I realize I never addressed how to handle that “/president” page myself. I don’t think I was expect it to carry much link weight versus the original URL that has been out there so long.

The original page redirects to Bush’s bio, as it should. It might be that it does make sense to keep that “/president” page pointing at whoever is the current sitting president. And they might be forced to inherit whatever linkbombs hit their predecessor in the past.

]]> http://searchengineland.com/obama-tops-for-who-is-failure-in-google-29788/feed 1 http://searchengineland.com/would-someone-please-explain-to-news-corp-how-google-works-29718 http://searchengineland.com/would-someone-please-explain-to-news-corp-how-google-works-29718#comments Thu, 12 Nov 2009 19:36:26 +0000 Danny Sullivan http://searchengineland.com/?p=29718

Yet another News Corporation executive is talking about Google, and yet again, I feel like they have no concept about how Google interacts with their web pages. Which is frightening, since they’re being very vocal about how they’re supposedly wronged by Google. Please, someone, give them a search marketing 101 course.

In the latest volley, News Corp’s president and COO Chase Carey tells Business Insider that being in Google is a “backdoor” that doesn’t “make sense” to offer if they’re trying to sell paid subscription.

Sigh.

Yes, you can use Google News as a way to get around the Wall Street Journal’s paywall. Through the First Click Free program that Google offers, anyone coming from Google has to be admitted to see the actual article. In fact, I’m a guilty party in telling people how to do this (see my Read The Wall Street Journal For Free post).

Here’s the thing. I’ve never, ever, heard anyone at the WSJ or News Corp before suggest that this is somehow a major problem, that this is a backdoor that’s being massively abused. To me, it’s similar to how there’s illegal music on the web. Sure there is, but for many people, it’s easier and cheaper just to buy a song legitimately. I suspect that many visiting the Wall Street Journal from Google News are:

• Interested in a one time article, will never buy a subscription, so you’ve lost nothing but gained an ad view (which are still valuable)
• Are not tying to “hack” an entire daily reading experience
• A few decide to buy a subscription (hurray, you made money)
• Some, like me, already have a subscription (and you’ve lost nothing)

Here’s the more important thing:

FIRST CLICK FREE IS NOT REQUIRED. YOU DON’T HAVE TO DO IT, AND YET YOU CAN STILL BE IN GOOGLE.

Sorry about all those caps and bolding, but after reading so much commentary earlier this week about News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch potentially taking his news content out of Google, I was amazed that this key point was being missed.

Publishers can have Google News index the entire text of their articles but NOT show the full story to visitors who come from Google (for Google’s web search, that’s not an option — but you can provide summary pages). They can also, if they choose, have only a small summary of their content indexed. These aren’t special hidden features that News Corp wouldn’t know about. Both are explained in Google’s public help files.

For example, here’s how it works for Newsday:

See that first story I’m pointing at, in response to a search for long island flooding? It’s from Newsday. But if I try to read the story:

No luck. I have to subscribe. No First Click Free, no passing Go, you collect your $200.

By the way, to my understanding, News Corp’s Barron’s has done this in the past and may still do this, so News Corp really should be aware of the option. Also, Google is supposed to flag this type of content with a “subscription” label, but that’s not being done for Newsday, probably due to a glitch. I’m checking on that.

So if Carey doesn’t want a backdoor, he doesn’t have to have one. He can shut it himself. Moreover, he can shut it and yet not have to shut the door on Google entirely. That’s important for those like Mark Cuban who like Murdoch’s “We’d rather have fewer people coming to our web sites, but paying” view, as Cuban commented to me in a discussion on Mathew Ingram blog post about the value of visitors. Cuban said:

The prevailing wisdom seems to be if you build it and they come, why not let them in the door ? The answer is because they get there, but don’t really know or care where they are at. They went to google and got what they were looking for from some site google sent them to. I know the numbers i have seen from news sites show that retention of uniques earned through google searches is not high. They are visitors. They leave. There is no relationship developed.

IMHO, just as people ignore the banner ads on pages, they ignore the name of the company presenting the content. One is just above the other.

You are the search expert, but my business sense tells me that its better to focus on the people who are there to dance with me. Block google. See what the information tells me. See what happens. I dont think you lose anything, and you might just hit a home run.

Let’s assume most people from Google don’t convert. So what? Block First Click Free, and you still get traffic from Google. You provide no “backdoor” access; you lose nothing. You only talk about Google as a backdoor that harms you if:

1. You don’t fully understand how Google indexes you
2. You have a deliberate agenda to put out false information

You also don’t say things like how you don’t need or want traffic from Google to News Corp publications when you’ve got parts of your organization actually spending your cold hard cash to buy that exact traffic. Here’s an ad for the Wall Street Journal on Google for financial news:

By the way, Carey didn’t just say that Google News readers should be cut-off from seeing free articles. He said he didn’t want people using any “channels” from getting there. So I guess that means the much discussed deal with Digg back in 2007 is on the chopping block, too. You know, the one that got a big splash because if someone submitted a story to Digg from the WSJ, then anyone could click from Digg and read that story?

Also, if the Journal really wants to be consistent, then you need to stop with the giveaway of ANYTHING on the site. As my Read The WSJ Free post also explains, the WSJ site itself has free content that it puts out for anyone independently of Google News. In fact, at Nieman Journalism Lab, WSJ executive editor Alan Murray explicitly described how the WSJ drops the paywall independently of Google, Digg or whatever — how you can start right at the WSJ site itself and get plenty of free stuff.

Rupert Murdoch added the Wall Street Journal and other Dow Jones properties to News Corp over two years ago. I understand that it takes time to fully digest what he purchased.

I understand he and his executives might not realize all the various ways that they themselves might be inconsistently fueling the same news “promiscuity” that they’re pinning on Google (see Dear WSJ: To Avoid Google Disease, Please Put A Condom On Your Content).

I understand Murdoch and his executives may not still realize yet how News Corp does some of the same evil aggregation that it rants against (see A Look At All The Sites Owned By Rupert Murdoch That ‘Steal’ Content from TechDirt for more).

But still, it doesn’t make much sense. I don’t understand why he is attacking Google so hard when he has so much control over his own content. He can keep them entirely out. He can let them send visitors but not give anything away at all. So could any newspaper, right now, today. But his executives have positioned Google as a “vampire” that’s somehow caused all this disruption.

Pondering this more in my head on Tuesday, it occurred to me. Rupert Murdoch doesn’t have a very good reputation in some news circles. That from the same article in the Wall Street Journal announcing his purchase of that publication, we had this:

Opponents of the deal called it a dark day for journalism. Leslie Hill, a family member who opposed the deal, resigned as a Dow Jones director late Tuesday afternoon. In a letter to the board, she conceded the deal was a good one in financial terms, but said it failed to outweigh “the loss of an independent global news organization with unmatched credibility and integrity.”

If you’re seen as a threat to quality journalism, as someone who oversees another part of your empire (Fox News) that the White House is trying to dismiss as a news organization, what better way to be seen as a journalism champion than to speak out as if you’re protecting all journalism from the evil of Google? Build Google up as the real threat to journalism. Suddenly, other media execs who viewed you as the “bad boy” of the journalism world are now looking at you with newfound respect (despite the fact that most of them are not “must carry” and won’t get any potential deal you might land).

Now THAT makes sense. Alternatively, it just makes sense that the News Corp execs simply don’t get how their businesses operate online, in respect to Google. Neither prospect is encouraging.

Postscript: The Daily Telegraph has remarks from Jonathan Miller, News Corp’s chief digital officer, saying that his company would block Google within “months and quarters — not weeks. He also wrote said News Corp could survive without the traffic and, in fact, that it didn’t have much value:

“The traffic which comes in from Google brings a consumer who more often than not read one article and then leaves the site. That is the least valuable of traffic to us… the economic impact [of not having content indexed by Google] is not as great as you might think. You can survive without it.”

As you’ll see in the comments below, I’m sure they and others can survive without it. But I suspect they could thrive with it. What’s amazing is that as shown above, News Corp spends money on ads at Google to attract the same audience from Google that they say isn’t as valuable. So we’re either getting PR spin or they’re doing a poor job of trying to convert those Google visitors.

With the ads, they can tell someone is after business news in general and send them to a very targeted landing page. With an click to a news story, someone’s intent IS different. They aren’t explicitly looking for site about business news, for example. But they clearly are interested in business news (or some type of news, as they’ve come). If they’re not converting, part of the issue is probably that the Wall Street Journal has done a poor job of trying to convert them. Rather than show them the same layout as you’d get when coming into the site, potentially they could have a much more simple display — with much more of a tailored pitch for getting more news.

Via Business Insider, there’s also a video of Miller’s remarks, though there are some weird audio issues with it:

]]> http://searchengineland.com/would-someone-please-explain-to-news-corp-how-google-works-29718/feed 15 http://searchengineland.com/googmob-deal-a-watershed-moment-for-mobile-advertising-29592 http://searchengineland.com/googmob-deal-a-watershed-moment-for-mobile-advertising-29592#comments Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:42:18 +0000 Greg Sterling http://searchengineland.com/?p=29592

Just as the introduction of the iPhone changed everything in the consumer world of mobile and helped usher in the era of the mobile internet, the pending Google acquisition of mobile display ad network AdMob is an almost equally significant event for mobile advertising. Over the past few years mobile advertising and marketing have been gaining steam, helped by a steady stream of research, positive case studies and evidence of mobile ad effectiveness — as well as the rich display units for the iPhone and other smartphones developed by AdMob and its competitors (Quattro, JumpTap, Millennial Media and others).

The fact of Google’s intended acquisition and the price tag ($750 million) help validate mobile (display) advertising in a number of ways. It’s the third largest acquisition price Google has paid, after YouTube and DoubleClick. It also shows how serious Google is about mobile advertising in general. According to an interview with Bloomberg, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said, “Our mobile revenue is growing faster than our regular revenue . . . All of the signs indicate a great success in this space.”

And rather than being publicly upset by the acquisition, AdMob’s competitors and others in the mobile ad universe are all but rejoicing. I was sent a link to a “facts” page Google had put together in support of the deal. Here’s a representative remark from Paran Johar, CMO of AdMob competitor JumpTap:

“The announcement is causing tremendous excitement as it validates the enormous potential of mobile advertising.  We predicted consolidation in the industry and Admob’s broad high volume business model is highly synergistic for Google.”

Many of the other players in the mobile ad network space now expect some sort of M&A activity to begin (a few years ago there were a number of mobile acquisitions by the big online players). That’s clearly one reason they’re excited. But Johar’s remark is accurate in that if nothing else it makes those in the digital marketing world take mobile seriously, if they weren’t doing so already. The “credibility” that Google brings to mobile advertising will accelerate mobile media buying and mobile ad revenues accordingly. 

Google is already the mobile search volume leader and it has been porting search ads over to smartphones automatically. On that front the company didn’t need any help. But its display efforts were, to date, fairly week in my opinion. With the AdMob network added to its own mobile AdSense efforts, Google arguably becomes the mobile ad network with the greatest reach in the US. But gaining the network and AdMob technology assets is only part of it for Mountain View. As Google Engineering VP Vic Gundotra told AdAge:

“Having [AdMob's] kind of talent and innovation within our own engineering teams is one of the primary drivers for this deal. … We think it really accelerates our progress in a very critical and strategically important area for us.”

The AdMob team will help coordinate and spearhead the next “iteration” of Google’s mobile ad efforts and strategy. Unlike on the PC where Google came late to display advertising with YouTube, DoubleClick and the DoubleClick Exchange, Google is now out in front in mobile display. Microsoft and Yahoo, which both have mobile display assets and growth aspirations, will need to respond to this move at some point in the near future. Yahoo had arguably been the leader in mobile display among the major search engines; however, Google’s move puts the company at least at parity — at least. 

I envision a time in the not-too-distant future when Google offers display ad buying across platforms through its Exchange. In a quick post-announcement briefing call Google VP Susan Wojcicki alluded to this (prompted by my question) in saying that she saw an opportunity to take an “holistic approach” to digital advertising. This is the dream that died a little when Google shuttered newspaper print ads and radio ads. But it rises again with this acquisition. And Google can also do some very interesting things now with mobile search and display combinations that it couldn’t do before. 

There are some analysts that have downplayed mobile display advertising as something that will fall way behind search or make up only a small percentage of mobile ad revenues. I think this move clearly shows that Google believes display is equally important in mobile and a powerful complement to what it’s doing on the search side.

]]> http://searchengineland.com/googmob-deal-a-watershed-moment-for-mobile-advertising-29592/feed 2 http://searchengineland.com/why-an-exclusive-wall-street-journal-deal-wouldnt-help-bing-29458 http://searchengineland.com/why-an-exclusive-wall-street-journal-deal-wouldnt-help-bing-29458#comments Mon, 09 Nov 2009 22:39:29 +0000 Danny Sullivan http://searchengineland.com/?p=29458

With Rupert Murdoch talking about blocking Google, Jason Calacanis suggests that Murdoch should cut an exclusive deal with Bing. If that doesn’t kill Google, it might at least win Bing a 10% search share or more within 6 months, he argues. I suggest Jason needs a reality check. Here’s one for him.

From his post today, Jason writes:

I put forth a simple strategy for Microsoft to pursue with Bing in which they would go to content providers like the New York Times or Wall Street Journal and offer them 50% more revenue then they are currently getting from Google search referrals to be exclusively indexed in Bing….

So, for a moment, imagine a world where Bing could say in their TV commercials:

“Want to search the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today and 3,894 other newspapers and magazine?”

“Well, then don’t go to Google because they don’t have them!”

“Go to Bing, home of quality content you can trust!”

OK, it’s a busy day for me, so I’m going to ramble a lot of off-the-cuff stuff that still ought to toss a big bucket of cold water on Jason’s high hopes. And I look forward to comments from anyone who wants to pull harder numbers together for some of the stuff I’m mentioning.

First, the AP has already dropped hints recently it wants to do the same thing, at least give one of the major search players an advance on stories. Maybe it can sell Bing on that idea. We’ll see. Google’s not blinking so far. If anything, Google CEO Eric Schmidt suggested last month that the AP has an inflated view of how valuable it is. From my live-blogging of his remarks in a meeting with reporters:

I want to distinguish betwen what you think your content is worth and what it’s worth [laughs all around]. We’re not going to use the price you think as a signal in the results.

Now let’s take your 50% more on search referrals idea. So Bing will offer to pay the Wall Street Journal 50% more than the ZERO Google currently pays for millions of referrals it sends the Wall Street Journal and other newspapers each day right now?

These newspapers don’t pay to be in Google’s editorial listings. They get tons of traffic from Google for free. What you really mean is that perhaps they could hope to convince Bing to pay them if they block Google from having their stories (and really, a headline link and short summary of their stories, not the stories themselves) in return for a gamble that Bing will send them either as much traffic or less traffic but more revenue.

OK, Jason, what’s that check that Bing needs to write to the WSJ? I don’t know how much traffic the WSJ gets per day from Google — for free. But we can take Compete for a starting point. It says the WSJ gets 12 million visitors per month, with 11% of those coming from Google –  about 1 million visitors per month. That feels low to me, but it’s in line with what some UK papers get.

Bing’s got about 10% of the search share; Google 70%. That’s from usage stats, by the way, not from stats based on actual traffic sent to sites. In that, Google’s much higher. Mahalo has stats — bet you’re in the 80% of all search traffic range from Google, aren’t you?

So right now, Bing’s about 1/7th the size of Google, if I’m doing my math right. Murdoch could do his deal with Bing as you suggest and thus lose his 1 million visitors in exchange for just over 150,000.

OK, so what’s the value of those remaining 850,000 million visitors? Remember, Murdoch’s also talking that he doesn’t mind a smaller audience if it’s one that pays. But those 150,000 million from Bing aren’t going to be paying. They’ll be just like people who come from Google now, needing to get free access to the Wall Street Journal at least for the first story they click through from or otherwise becoming very annoyed at Bing for sending them smack into a paywall.

Also, it’s not really an 850,000 visitor difference we’re talking about. I mean, Bing exists right now. It should already be sending 150,000 people to the Wall Street Journal, if we work off a direct proportion to what we guess Google already sends now (and that’s very rough work). Really, doing the Bing deal as you suggest doesn’t give the WSJ a net gain. It just potentially cuts off those 1 million people from Google.

So what are those people worth? What’s the amount Bing needs to pay to make up for all that lost traffic? Are they worth $0.50 per day – (or $15 per month; $180 per year)? That’s about $180 million per year Bing needs to pay just to the WSJ alone to guarantee they’re not losing that $0.50 per day, per person, that they might be earning. Maybe they earn a lot less; quite possibly, they earn more.

And that’s just to pay the WSJ, right? What about all the other papers that want to put their hands out? Does the New York Times get the same deal? It’s not hard to get up to 1/2 billion in money to license the right to link people to content on the news providers web sites, all in the hopes that this will make your search engine overall THAT much more compelling that Google overall.

No, I don’t think that makes sense for Bing todo. Keep in mind that most people at Google do NOT go to Google News. Stats from last year from Hitwise put Google News at 1% of Google’s overall traffic. Also go back and look again at those Compete stats for the WSJ. Bing’s portal partner MSN and Yahoo both send the WSJ more traffic already than Google. There’s almost certainly a licensing deal in place, and it clearly doesn’t seem to be generating enough revenue to make Murdoch declare that the war for payment in online is over.

Maybe Bing would see some growth, which would send it more traffic, which would mean the minimum revenues it needs to pay the member papers would be less. But I doubt it would be much.

Moreover, there are paid subscription services that you can tap into right now that give you the ability to search and read content from a variety of newspapers and magazines. They clearly aren’t that compelling to the majority of searchers out there.

Also, how much of the WSJ is vital information that absolutely cannot be found in other sources? Even the WSJ knows that much of what it has isn’t unique. They do have great content — I know, I actually take the print version and read it usually each day. But on a day I skip it, I’m hardly out of the loop newswise.

So you ask in your post, What’s the percentage chance I think Bing will do as you suggest? About 1%.

The reality is that the Wall Street Journal execs seem to be leading a charge against Google without really knowing where they are going or what they want. They already get lots of traffic plus get to have a paywall, thanks to First Click Free at Google. And yet, Murdoch doesn’t seem to know exactly how that operates or how Google indexes his paper. His managing editor Robert Thomson gets confused about font sizes and how Google News works. I get the impression both of them are good at talking but don’t know the actual realities of their traffic situation in relation to Google. Or they know it well but are happy to ignore it.

So why are they talking so much? At best I can tell, they seem to want a licensing deal similar to what the AP, the AFP and a few other services get. Perhaps they’ll even get it, and if so, I imagine it would be on the order of 10s of millions, not hundreds of millions. And the smaller papers out there won’t get it, as I’ve written before (see Garlic For The Google Vampire). They’re not “must carry” publications. Murdoch may sound like he’s speaking for the industry but really, he seems to be speaking to strike his own particular deal.

But hey, let’s assume they do a deal in the end. Let’s say the AP does one, too, where they withhold information from Google completely or for a set period of time. Are both publications going to stop using Google? No. And if they’re not, who’s going to start talking about how hypocritical they are? It’s fine for them both to have literally hundreds of reporters each day using Google to mine information for their web sources, something that’s free for them to do? (See Do Newspapers Owe Google “Fair Share” Fees For Researching Stories for more on this). Or are they going to start paying research fees to Google, so it can in turn redistribute those fees out to the millions of resources it currently carries — upon which they currently depend?

Finally, let me end on that trust thing. I know that lots of people who post and blog on the web have a growing mistrust of Google. But ordinary people still seem to trust it, a lot. Survey after survey shows it as a top brand. And in a time when search results between the major search engines aren’t that different, what’s the key element Google has over its rivals?

It’s trusted. It is a trusted friend that diligently serves millions who use it each day. Your ad campaign of how Bing could say it’s the home of “quality content?” People already think they’ve got that at Google. I don’t see it flying.

Postscript: From Hitwise, some statistics. According to them, both Google overall and Google News send more traffic to the Wall Street Journal than any other site, 25% combined.

Postscript 2 (Nov. 22, 2009): Since this was written, we’ve had more news that News Corp is being enticed by Bing. See:

• Badda Bing! Microsoft woos newspapers by funding their stick to beat Google
• Microsoft and News Corp eye web pact

The first is from TechCrunch about a week ago; the second from the Financial Times today. And before things get spinning that this was all Jason Calacanis’s idea — while I like Jason, he used to work for Jonathan Miller, who heads digital for the Wall Street Journal. Suffice to say, I think News Corp is putting out a lot of trial balloons — I suspect Miller mentioned this idea to Jason, who in turn put it out there. I highly doubt in the space of two weeks that News Corp said “get me Microsoft; this sounds like a plan. Or vice-versa.

I suspect that News Corp’s most valuable content of all its properties remains the Wall Street Journal. Google operated just fine for years when the WSJ wasn’t included. I highly doubt this would hurt them. That’s especially so because, as even the WSJ has acknowledged in the past, people can locate other sources for the news they report.

Also, it’s noteworthy that virtually all major news publications in Belgium a few years ago opted-out of Google (absurdly suing to get out, rather than using voluntary systems). The lawsuit was more about hopes to blackmail Google into paying the papers to be included. Instead, Google conceded and dropped them. And down the line, the papers effectively came crawling back asking to be reincluded. Belgian Papers Back In Google; Begin Using Standards For Blocking has more. Whether News Corp’s content is more valuable to Google than that of an entire country’s remains to be seen.

Finally, it’s an extremely odd move to me for Microsoft to be trying to strike exclusive deals like this. It’s one thing to license content. It’s another to try and suggest that a competitor be locked out. Microsoft has a terrible anti-competitive reputation. It’s also trying to convince regulators in the US and Europe that it should be allowed to acquire Yahoo’s search technology, because that will — it argues — make a better competitor to Google. You can expect that Google will use an anti-competitive partnership with News Corp as a sign of arguing that Microsoft is “back to its old tricks” to pressure against such a deal.

See also these past posts, that provide more background and perspective:

• Would Someone Please Explain To News Corp How Google Works?
• Josh Cohen Of Google News On Paywalls, Partnerships & Working With Publishers
• Google’s News Experiments & The Quest To Solve The “Read State” Issue

Postscript 3: See Assorted Thoughts On A “Killer” Bing-News Corp Deal, which incorporates some of my previous postscript with additional comments.

]]> http://searchengineland.com/why-an-exclusive-wall-street-journal-deal-wouldnt-help-bing-29458/feed 2 http://searchengineland.com/how-google-yahoo-make-money-off-a-twitter-typo-domain-29302 http://searchengineland.com/how-google-yahoo-make-money-off-a-twitter-typo-domain-29302#comments Thu, 05 Nov 2009 19:57:12 +0000 Danny Sullivan http://searchengineland.com/?p=29302

Like many people, I misspelled a domain name today when I was trying to visit a web site. I typed Twiter.com (with one T) rather than Twitter.com. I wasn’t surprised to land on a site with ads, as is common when entering typos. I was surprised that both Google and Yahoo were making money off those ads.

Google has a program known as AdSense For Domains, previously known as DomainPark. Got a tasty domain but no content for it? AdSense For Domains will put lucrative ads up on it, for you (really lucrative: see more here and here).

The practice is known as domaining. And before some domainers start working up heated rebuttals, let me make it clear. There’s nothing wrong with domaining. If you were lucky enough or smart enough to land a generic domain like usedcars.com or taxforms.com, my hat’s off to you. It’s well known that people will simply slap words together, tack on a .com and see if they reach a site that has information about a particular topic relating to those words. Domainers earn off that traffic, and no one is misled when visitors directly navigate this way.

So saying domaining = spamming is the same as saying SEO = spamming. Neither is true. But there are spam tactics that happen in both areas along with the legit stuff. In the domaining world, it’s the typo traffic that’s often scummy, in my book.

Typo domains are domains that are nearly identical to the domain name of another well known brand. Here, there is often harm. Someone expecting to reach a particular site instead lands on a different one that’s cashing in on the other brand’s fame.

OK, it’s the person who is entering the domain name wrong in the first place’s fault, right? It’s like they dialed the wrong phone number. Why shouldn’t a domain owner be able to earn off of misdirected calls to their phone? Or, it’s the “real” company’s fault for not registering all the typos out there.

What about companies that have a name in use before another company becomes more famous? Is there really anything wrong with UTube — a well established pipe company — benefiting from a spike in traffic after some upstart YouTube video site came along? Or in the case of Twiter, that domain existed well before Twitter became popular, so why shouldn’t it tap into new found popularity.

These are fair objections. In counter to them, some typo domains are often registered after a brand becomes popular, with the obvious intent of riding on someone else’s coattails. For another, it simply violates the policies of some ad networks, Google’s included. In other words, the fault isn’t with the domain owner themselves. It’s with companies supplying ads in violation of their own guidelines or policies.

That leads us to what I saw when I reached Twiter.com, the single “T” web site:

These ads are provided by Google, not that anything on the page tells you this. Domain ads apparently aren’t forced to carry those “Ads By Google” notifications as with contexual ads. That’s a handy way for Google to distance itself.

The first and fifth ad indicates a relevancy issue for Google advertisers. If you’re advertising “Free VoiceXML platform” or “Monitor Server health,” why on earth is someone from Twiter (one T) going to convert for you? They might click out of curiousity, but the probably aren’t going to buy (in fact, there’s a lawsuit against Google over the quality of domain ads pending. Google’s has also been sued over trademark issues with typo domains).

Now look at the second ad, which I’ve pointed an arrow at:

Twitter? Twitter is here Need Twitter? Official Twitter site Twitter lets you share. Its Twitter www.Twitter.com

That ad surprised me. Really, Twitter (that of 2 Ts) decided to buy an ad for its own name via Google? Actually, no. Instead, it’s a Twitter user that bought the ad, driving people to their particular profile which, while indeed being on the official Twitter site, isn’t providing Twitter but rather a pitch for a book:

Clever person, right? Yes, but they also likely being misleading. That would violate Google’s ad guidelines and also may violate advertising laws in various US states, as well as nationally and in other countries.

That ad also shows two flaws in Google’s ad system. Clearly no human being looked closely at this ad, to review it for quality guideline violations. Meanwhile, Google’s requirement that the display URL in an ad match the domain name someone arrives at get exploited. This ad correctly shows a Twitter.com domain, even though the ad itself doesn’t speak with the authority of Twitter itself.

Check out the third ad, with an arrow pointing at the domain (which I’ve also bolded below):

Twitter Looking for Twitter? Find exactly what you want today. Yahoo.com

Why yes, I was indeed looking for Twitter. Glad to know that Yahoo has it now. I guess I missed news of that deal being cut. Let’s go get us some Twitter at Yahoo:

Ah, Twitter, er, shopping results. Maybe that lamp beams out tweets, when you turn it on. The results are kind of crummy. But that’s OK, because right at the top of the page, we get three paid search ads from Yahoo.

Now, it’s not Yahoo doing this directly. Looking at the URL that brings me to the shopping page, I see an affiliate reference. So this is someone earning money by driving Yahoo traffic. But Yahoo takes some of the blame here. It’s their affiliate, getting paid by Yahoo, and Yahoo should be policing this.

Yahoo, by the way, joined a coalition against typo domains back in 2007. They’re no longer listed as a member, which given these type of ads, is probably best.

The rest of the ads are all products somehow related to Twitter, so at least the misleading aspects aren’t there. But there still seems to be a violation of Google’s domain ads program policies:

Domains submitted for the AdSense for domains program may not violate any trademark (and related rights), copyright, trade secret, patent or other intellectual property right of any third party….

Google AdSense for domains is committed to respecting the rights of trademark owners. It is our goal that advertisers, users and trademark owners all be aware of Google’s process for reviewing perceived trademark infringement in the AdSense for domains network. If Google becomes aware of a domain name that contains a trademark (or typo), that domain will be removed from the AdSense for domains network.

At best, Google might argue that Twitter hasn’t submitted a formal complaint, so as far as it knows, there’s no trademark violation happening. That’s still pretty weak. Does Google, which often holds itself out as championing the relevant organization of information, really want to hold its head up about what’s happening on that page?

I don’t think so. That’s especially so when you consider the type of ads that show up on Google’s own site for a search on twitter:

That Twitter user claiming to be the official Twitter site doesn’t show there. Neither does the Yahoo ad promising to deliver Twitter.

If those ads aren’t good enough to be shown on the shining storefront that is Google’s search results page, they don’t get any better being plastered on some dark alley of the internet.

Postscript: After publishing this, I sent these questions to Google.

• Are the ads from that Twitter user and from Yahoo meeting your relevancy guidelines?
• Are they not misleading?
• If they are, were these actually reviewed by a human?
• And does the site violate your guidelines on typo domains or not?

In response, I was emailed this statement:

We don’t comment on specific ads or domains – but our AdSense for Domains policies are here. When we’re notified of complaints, we investigate for compliance with our policy.  We’ve found that advertisers enjoy the benefits of the additional reach that AdSense for Domains offers.  Many advertisers find that ads on parked domains perform as well as or better than ads on more traditional search and content sites.

Today, the site is no longer showing ads from Google. Instead, another company is providing the paid ads.

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