Google and Twitter have teamed up to support a web site that’s facing legal trouble for reporting news too quickly. Reuters reports that Google and Twitter filed a brief Monday in an appeals court case involving theflyonthewall.com, a web site that reports financial industry and stock market news. A U.S. District Court ruled earlier this […]
Google News, which has always prided itself on being a 100% computer-generated news aggregator with no human intervention, is doing an about-face. The Nieman Journalism Lab reports that a limited test is underway which involves human editors from “partner news organizations” manually choosing certain articles “to be featured on Google News.” The new Editors’ Picks […]
Major news portals — like Yahoo News, Google News, AOL, and Topix — are the most commonly used online news sources, beating out the web sites of major news outlets like CNN, CBS, and the New York Times. That’s according to the the State of the Media report issued tonight by the Pew Research Center’s […]
Techmeme is one of my favorite sites. It’s my morning “newspaper” that covers technology headlines from across the web. And now it’s joined by a new site just for media news, Mediagazer. I’m thrilled to see the new site arrive, even if it means more reading for me. Much of the “tech” news on Techmeme […]
The Pew Internet project has just released a lengthy report on online news consumption entitled Understanding the Participatory News Consumer. There are no search-specific findings; however it appears from the survey data that “portal websites like Google News, AOL and Topix are the most commonly used online news sources, visited by over half of online news users on a typical day.” Here are some of the high-level findings […]
Yesterday, Mark Cuban warned media owners in a keynote speech that Google is a vampire trying to suck them dry, giving them nothing back and daring owners to block it. This is the same Mark Cuban who is an investor in Mahalo, which touts to advertisers how it taps into Google to generate page views. […]
Google News has added the ability to allow users to “star” news stories. When a user stars a story (or technically, a cluster of stories), it: Lets Google know that you’re interested in that subject. Alerts you to significant updates by putting the headline in bold, so you can get more information. Allows you to […]
It’s been noticed that new Associated Press stories — hosted by Google itself — are no longer appearing in Google News. It’s true. Since Dec. 24, Google has no longer added new AP content, something the company confirmed with me today. I received this statement: We have a licensing agreement with the Associated Press that […]
Google Fast Flip, the company’s experimental news reading tool, is now part of the Google News home page, while also still remaining a Google Labs project. According to Google’s announcement, Fast Flip will appear at the bottom of the Google News home page — a display option Google was seen testing back in November. Publishers […]
According to November comScore data (published by TechCrunch) Google News is the second largest online news property in the world in terms of traffic. Yahoo ranks as the top global news site. Here’s the partial comScore list: Yahoo News Google News New York Times sites CNN China’s QQ.com BBC MSN In the US Yahoo still […]
Fast Flip, the Google experiment that aims to make reading news online more like reading a newspaper or magazine, has expanded its list of sources. When Fast Flip launched in September, it had three dozen publishers on board. With today’s announcement, the number and variety of sources has grown: Today, we’re excited to be adding […]
Google has unveiled a new Living Stories are, where the New York Times and the Washington Post are experimenting with how coverage of a particular news story would look if content was all centralized within a single page. The experiment puts into practice a vision that Google has long expressed previously as “Living URLs,” a […]
In the battle between search engines and some mainstream news publishers, ACAP has been lurking for several years. ACAP — the Automated Content Access Protocol — has constantly been positioned by some news executives as a cornerstone to reestablishing the control they feel has been lost over their content. However, the reality is that publishers […]
Forget PageRank, at least if you’re a news publisher looking to do well in Google News. Google’s news service doesn’t rely on the same algorithm used by “regular” Google, of which PageRank is a part of. Instead, Google News taps into its own unique ranking signals, which include user clicks, the estimated authority of a […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
The long-running debate over Google and its impact on newspapers and journalism took another turn today when News Corp founder Rupert Murdoch said his company may makes its sites invisible to Google, and Google fired back by saying, in essence, bring it on. It began with this interview on Australia’s Sky News (which Murdoch owns), […]
Associated Press president Tom Curley and News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch both made speeches yesterday in China that are being widely reported as an attack on Google. Having read through the actual speeches, I was surprised they weren’t as bad as I thought they’d be. Below, I’ve highlighted key portions along with my own commentary. […]
The previously rumored Google news site “Flipper” is in fact launching today as “Fast Flip” in Google Labs. But maybe it should be called Google Skimmer because it permits people to move very quickly through lots of visually rich news pages from dozens of partner publications. According to the Google Blog Post: Fast Flip is […]
Ambivalent is word that best describes newspaper publishers’ relationship with Google and Google News in particular. Some publishers see Google as a partner or potential partner and some consider Google to be the devil incarnate, responsible for virtually all their woes. For its part Google sees itself as a supporter of newspapers, helping them by […]
A new Columbia Journalism Review opinion piece argues persuasively (in my view) that Google “owes” something to traditional journalism and news organizations. Google, typically, is a stand-in for “the internet” in these discussions. This notion of responsibility to publishers is unpopular among bloggers and Internet denizens more generally. I tend to fault news organizations for […]
As first noticed by Michael Dorausch, and later expanded on by Michael Gray, Google has very recently begun showing Wikipedia as a news source on Google News. Little has been said about this until today, when Google’s Gabriel Stricker confirmed to the Nieman Journalism Lab that it’s part of a small experiment on Google’s part: […]
Discussions between Google and the Associated Press about renewing their content licensing deal continue, I assume, but all’s quiet recently on the negotiation front. I want to disrupt that. It would be wrong in this particular case for both parties to reach a deal where “terms are not disclosed.” The future of journalism, as well […]
Google News has changed how they display clusters of news. If you take a look at a news cluster, such as this one you will now notice links across the top that read “Full Coverage of articles, blogs, local sources, images, quotes and videos.” You can then click view more articles within blogs, videos, or […]
In addition to the new similar image search, Google has also announced the addition of Google News Timeline as a Google Labs experimental service. Google News Timeline is what it sounds like — a tool that lets you see news coverage over a period of time. A search for “somali pirates” showing weekly coverage looks […]
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 […]
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 […]
Google Operating System spotted that Google News started to add timelines to their news clusters. For example, if you search for obama in Google News and then click on the link “all ### news articles,” you will then be taken to the cluster of news items on that topic. That news cluster shows a timeline […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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Contextual content and advertising provider Proximic released an iPhone app, as the first step into a much broader foray into consumer-facing mobile search. The company’s underlying technology is called “pattern proximity matching,” which seeks to better understand pages and context through numerous points of relevance. Company CEO Philipp Pieper says that it can be used […]
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 […]
Google Blog Search just had a big change announced today — top blog posts are now clustered on the home page around particular story topics, similar to how Google News (or Techmeme) operates. You can also drill into various categories of posts, such as technology or politics. It looks interesting and promising, and we’re going […]
The Yahoo Search Blog announced they have made “significant enhancements” to how they show news results in the web search results. Yahoo is now showing news results in different positions throughout the web search results, based on their new “News Direct Display (DD)” algorithm. In addition, Yahoo improved how they detect news queries and will […]
Earlier we reported about the new Microsoft Live Search News being launched. The Official Live Search blog has posted about the revamp. Below are are more details about the service and how it works.
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
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 […]