Apr 9, 2009 at 1:35am ET by Matt McGee

This week's battle royale has pitted newspapers and traditional media against Google and online news. If you somehow missed it, the CliffsNotes version is that traditional media (Associated Press, newspapers, etc.) are accusing Internet sites (search engines, news aggregators, etc.) of diverting traffic that should be going to news web sites, profiting off news content in violation of copyright law, and essentially sending newspapers into the financial crisis that many are in today. Amidst all the claims and accusations, Danny took the AP and newspapers out to the woodshed and pointed out w [...]

Amid Tensions Google’s Eric Schmidt Addresses Newspaper Conference

Apr 7, 2009 at 6:03pm ET by Greg Sterling

Google CEO Eric Schmidt addressed the Newspaper Association of America conference in San Diego this morning. It comes against the backdrop of the AP copyright controversy, rising tension between Google and newspapers and publisher frustrations with their own declining revenues. Some have accused Google of devaluing their content. Schmidt's talk was generally sunny and upbeat especially about the role of technology in solving problems. The most interesting part of the talk was the Q&A session. Here's a summary and general paraphrase of the question and answer part of the speech: Quest [...]

AP Becomes “Bad Cop” To “Protect” Newspaper Content Against “Misappropriation”

Apr 7, 2009 at 10:09am ET by Greg Sterling

The Associated Press announced an aggressive new policy whereby it is going to try and get more money for newspaper content online or take legal action against "copyright violators" and those that won't pay. From the AP's own press release: The Associated Press Board of Directors today announced it would launch an industry initiative to protect news content from misappropriation online. AP Chairman Dean Singleton said the news cooperative would work with portals and other partners who properly license content – and would pursue legal and legislative ac [...]

Financial Times Launches Newssift, A Business News Search Engine

Mar 18, 2009 at 8:01pm ET by Matt McGee

Newssift, a semantic business news search engine created by The Financial Times, has launched in beta tonight. Currently indexing thousands of news sources worldwide, and with millions of articles in its database, Newssift aims to bring context and meaning that its creators say is missing from traditional keyword-based business news search engines. "We want to put an angel on the shoulders of the business person," says Newssift CEO Robin Johnson. We took Newssift for a pre-launch spin, and the search engine does offer a compelling experience as a business research tool. The screenshot b [...]

Kosmix Launches MeeHive Personalized News

Mar 11, 2009 at 6:00am ET by Chris Sherman

MeeHive, a personalized service that scans more than 5,000 news sources and 5 million blogs to bring you fresh news and information based on your interests, launches today. MeeHive organizes information "relevant to a person rather than a topic," with "fundamentally time-changing information," said Kosmix co-founder Venky Harinarayan. The service is very easy to use. You can select general topics of interest by ticking category boxes such as "online advertising," "food and wine," or "gadgets," or more specific topics by typing in search queries that are saved as your own custom categories. [...]

Newspapers, Google And The “Devaluation” Of Content

Feb 13, 2009 at 11:03am ET by Greg Sterling

The word "content" wasn't historically used to broadly describe writing or imagery or video until the internet. The term "content" also implies a kind of generic equivalence -- lots of things that are more or less of equal value or can be lumped into the same bucket. That notion certainly applies to what's happened to news online. We all know the well-documented survey data that show the internet has become the preferred news source (or in some surveys second to TV) across age groups in the US. We all also know the terrible financial condition of major metro daily newspapers in the US. The [...]

TweetNews: Yahoo Programmer Melds News Search & Twitter

Jan 15, 2009 at 7:18pm ET by Matt McGee

TweetNews is a new search engine that uses hot Twitter topics to bring more relevance and freshness to news search. It's a pet project developed by Vik Singh, a member of Yahoo's BOSS team. As Vik describes it on his personal blog, fresh news often doesn't have enough links to rank well in a traditional algorithm. But TweetNews replaces links with Twitter conversations as a signal; news stories that are being talked about the most on Twitter will rise to the top of a TweetNews search. It's an interesting mashup because it plays to the real strength of Twitter -- its ability to report [...]

5 (More) Search Tools You May Not Know … But Should

Dec 29, 2008 at 1:28pm ET by Matt McGee

How would you like to track hot news geographically? Or see where social conversations are happening on a map? Maybe you'd like to find businesses that are open 24 hours a day, or research keywords on a state-by-state basis. If so, read on for a look at five search tools you may not know about, but should. About two months ago, we published 7 Search Tools You May Not Know ... But Should. That became a popular article and let us know that we should continue uncovering largely unknown search tools in future articles. So, here's the second in an irregular series of posts about search tools you [...]

Find Friends On Twitter With Twitter People Search

Dec 24, 2008 at 9:18am ET by Barry Schwartz

Twitter announced that you can now use their people search feature to find friends, family or colleagues that are using Twitter. For example, I wanted to see if any of my immediate family is on Twitter, so I searched for schwartz. It looks like I am the most popular Schwartz on Twitter (ahem). But it does list another 233 people with the name Schwartz, so I will scan through them to see if I know anyone. I do wish there was an RSS flavor for this search, so I can track particular names. But the normal Twitter Search has RSS, so that works. [...]

Techmeme Now Deploys Human Editing Of News

Dec 3, 2008 at 5:41pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Gabe Rivera, has [...]

Tip’d: Social Community For Economic News Launches

Oct 14, 2008 at 12:13pm ET by Matt McGee

Hoping to cash in on the increased awareness and interest in financial and economic news, a group of search and social media marketers have launched Tip'd, a social community for the financial industry. If you're familiar with digg, mixx, or sphinn, you'll understand how Tip'd works: Users submit and vote ("Tip It" or "Topple") on stories, leave comments, share interesting stories with friends, and so forth. Where Tip'd is unique is its focus specifically on financial content. Categories include Stocks, Green, Economy, and Real Estate, among others. "Social news in the traditional fo [...]

Google Blogs & Other “Front Pages” For The Blogosphere

Oct 2, 2008 at 3:40pm ET by Danny Sullivan

When Techmeme opened in 2005, I'd found a new online newspaper to begin my day with. It quickly and neatly organized top stories as reported by various blogs and news sources for the area I cover. But if you weren't into technology, you seemed kind of out of luck. Now Google Blog Search has stepped in to bring Techmeme-like organization for all subjects buzzing in the blogosphere. Below, a look at how it compares along with other resources such as Technorati and Blogrunner. Major Search Engines & Blog Search Google's new service has only been out for less than a day, so I don't [...]

Twitter & Summize Tie The Knot

Jul 15, 2008 at 3:16pm ET by Barry Schwartz

The rumors that Twitter will be buying Summize have now been confirmed. Twitter, the popular micro-blogging platform, has acquired Summize, a search engine that searches Twitter. You can read all the news at Techmeme and also make sure to check out Danny's write up on Summize named Summize Gains "Local" Twitter Search Option. [...]

You Can Search Techmeme

May 20, 2008 at 4:14pm ET by Barry Schwartz

You can now search for past Techmeme articles directly on the site or at http://techmeme.com/search/. Techmeme's founder, Gabe Rivera, announced the new feature today at his blog. He explained that the Techmeme search engine only searches full headlines on Techmeme, in reverse chronological order but not "discussions" listed under the headlines. You can search in two primary ways: (1) Search for title or the first couple of sentences, and (2) Search for full article text The default search is by title and first couple sentences, but you can change that option at the Techmeme se [...]

Myanmar Cyclone Maps, Paid Search Ads, & Other Disaster Resources

May 6, 2008 at 8:38am ET by Greg Sterling

This past weekend a cyclone hit Myanmar (formerly Burma), killing at least 15,000 with many more missing. It's a massive tragedy. Now data on the cyclone and its path, from the UN Institute for Training and Research Operational Satellite Applications Programme, are available as a layer in Google Earth. But there are other maps and resources available online as well. Below is a short roundup of what we found. Google Earth: From the European Commission (via ReliefWeb): Myanmar-related news on MetaCarta's GeoSearch news maps: From the New York Times: I found the NY Times map via a se [...]

Microsoft Launches Live Search News

Apr 16, 2008 at 9:17am ET by Barry Schwartz

Microsoft hits back at Google with Live Search News from News.com reports Microsoft has launched Live Search News. Live Search News takes a more linear view of news compared to the [...]

Yahoo Buzz Launches: Votes, Searches, & Emails Used To Rank News

Feb 26, 2008 at 1:40am ET by Danny Sullivan

As expected, Yahoo Buzz has now launched -- a site where "buzz-worthy" news articles are highlighted based on user votes, searching activity, and email sharing. Hot stories on Buzz may also get featured on the Yahoo home page, an added incentive to get publishers considering the program. At launch, Buzz is said to have stories included from nearly 100 publishers. A future program will allow other publishers to participate. It's not clear if content is automatically submitted or if this happens only when a Buzz Badge is added to a story and used by readers at a site to submit to [...]

Newspond Lauches News Aggregation Site That Uses A “Tireless Electronic Brain”

Feb 20, 2008 at 3:51pm ET by Vanessa Fox

Newspond is a news aggregation site that boasts "No editors. No voting. Just an AI news engine." Presumably, the lack of voting distinguishes it from sites like Digg and the lack of editing from the Mahalo-like and maybe Slashdot? Does this mean it's like Ask's recent news aggregation entry BigNews but with fewer categories? Or maybe it's like Google News? Or Techmeme? So far, Newspond aggregates three categories of news: tech, games, and science. It sorts by "buoyancy rating" (which seems to be simply current popularity), provides additional sources for the story, and allows comments. It sor [...]

Topix To Power Community For Local NBC Affiliates

Feb 19, 2008 at 9:23am ET by Greg Sterling

Community and local news site Topix struck an agreement to power discussion forums for NBC Universal’s 10 local owned and operated station web sites. Topix already does this for selected newspapers and Gannett TV sites and claims 100 media partners for its local news and/or community features. Topix CEO Chris Tolles says that "60% of the 'articles' on Topix are now 'original,' from scratch, posts not referring to a story [and] 75% of the pageviews on Topix are on the commentary." Here's his post responding to Google's introduction of local news, which argues that crawling existing sources [...]

Hyper-Local “News” Site EveryBlock Emerges

Jan 24, 2008 at 8:23am ET by Greg Sterling

EveryBlock is a new local "news" site that seeks to answer the question, "What's happening in my neighborhood?" It aggregates data and content from a variety of sources and currently covers three US cities: Chicago, New York, and San Francisco. EveryBlock competes with Outside.in, YourStreet, and Topix to some degree. We noticed the site based on a post at TechCrunch. The site features three types of "news," according to the EveryBlock blog: Civic information -- building permits, crimes, restaurant inspections, and more. In many cases, this information is already on the Web but is buried in [...]

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