Are You Ogling Google News?

heytal asks: "Yes, It's old news, and you all have been to Google News at least once. And yes, it crawls Slashdot and considers it as one of the news sources too ;-).This article is an interesting article on how things work, and how Google News would change the industry. What I want to ask the Slashdot users is their experience with Google News, how much they use it, and how has it changed their news surfing habbits?"

Comments

It's not the New York Times

[LordNimon]

The NYT has professionals that evaluate all the news stories and make judgements as to what to put up front. Because they're very good at it, you get high-quality journalism on relevant topics on the front page. Trash news sites like ABCNews.com and CNN.com think that "American Idol" is just as important as the situation with Iraq.

However, Google News has an advantage in that it covers news sites from all over the world, and presumably the more coverage an issue gets, the more prominently it is displayed. This technically provides less bias in news stories (i.e. not so US-centric).

So, I read both sites.

Slate has an interesting article too.

[Utopia]

Google invents McNews

Slashdot Editors Trolling

[CokeBear]

This article is a blatent attempt by the editors of Slashdot to get Google linking recursivly to them. Nice try guys.

Lamest line in the article

[rw2]

Ok, maybe I'm just pissy because Poliglut and slashdot do the same exact thing (re-reporting of news) and slashdot is a google news source while I'm not (and, just for the record, I think neither should be) but...

The funniest line in that article had to be:
"What savvy publishers of registration-required sites must do, he says, is work with Google in order to be included in their news searches."

Er, savvy? Really. How about not completely brain dead. It doesn't require savvy or any other synonym for smart to realize that google is a big site and that, if your goal is hits, you should be listed there.

Do 'savvy' webmasters register their sites with search engines? No. They are *way* past that 1994 era stumbling block to glory.

This is no different.

Ongoing experiment

[babbage]

Honestly, I'd been using news.google.com as my main headlines page for several months now, and was surprised to find, when I woke up & checked my regular morning pages the other day, that the layout had been made much more complicated (because, of course, the site had gone public).

The previous layout was a whole lot simpler, just a simple list of categories, top stories within each, and four or five links to that story from different sources. One nice touch was that the link for each story was the headline used for it, which was nice because you could tell at a glance who was just repeating a wire feed and who really had something worthwhile -- and sometimes you could get nicely contrasting stories (like, say, the same event in Kashmir as described by both Indian & Pakistani news sources). The new, more complex & busy layout doesn't allow them to do this anymore, which IMO is a change for the worse.

AS for the new layout, I dunno. It has much higher information density, which the Edward Tufte fan in me thinks is a very good thing. But it's a very busy layout, and so a bit overwhelming to me. I'm finding that I haven't spent as much time on the new version as I was before on the old one, and I'm not checking it as often either -- maybe just a cursory glance once or twice a day, as opposed to a more careful skim several times a day before. Compared to the sparse layouts that Google ordinarily uses, a design this heavy feels very jarring to me, where on another site I probably wouldn't care. Hopefully I'll get over this.

Here's an interesting angle though, from the article the original submitter noted:

Google News already has made arrangements with some leading news sites that use registration schemes -- such as The New York Times. Google News users who click on links to NYTimes.com articles at Google News go directly to the article -- there's no intervening registration screen -- even if they're not already registered at NYTimes.com. This works, explains product manager Mayer, because the site allows Google's spiders to crawl its content and include links in the Google service. When a non-registered user hits a NYTimes.com page, the site will recognize that it's a referral from Google News and serve up the content -- delaying the registration requirement for one page. When the Google News user tries to go elsewhere on NYTimes.com, then the registration system kicks in. If the user is already registered, then NYTimes.com reads the user's NYT cookie and doesn't ask for registration information.

Why can't Slashdot come up with such an arrangment? The NY TImes is one of the best news sources on the 'net, and I'm sure their staff has to have at least some Slashdot fans. The constant whining disclaimers about having to register -- and the even more bizarre constant opposition to the very idea -- could all be short-circuited if the two sites could enter into a similar arrangement. Why has this never happened? Lack of imagination, or is one side or the other just uninterested? Whatever the obstacle has been, I'd be happy if we could just get over it and set up some kind of arrangement.

Google has a clue

[Raetsel]

That's why I go there -- and have for a long time. Google is what CNN used to be... for me, at least.

The best part of it is that the content comes from a much more diverse set of sources than I'd ever be willing to surf on my own. I'd like to see a full list of the sites they're crawling, but I've been happy with their results so far.

• CNN has become progressively worse. It used to be a large page of stories, and I could find out what was going on in the world in a single page load. Now things are down to (something like) two links per catgory, and you have to dig to find your news.

• MSNBC has stuck with their layout (to their credit), but there's all those menues (or interstitial ads) to deal with -- ick.

• Salon is a giant editorial page, not news. I'm not even going to comment on their in-your-face ads (oops, I just did...)

• Fox News, ABC, USA Today -- I never had any desire to read their sites for some reason.

• Newspaper sites are often too regional (local papers), or require registration (NY Times, Washington Post), so I just didn't read 'em. They'll learn eventually that registration = less readership = less banner ad revenue. Give 'em time, the clue will come.

• NPR is nice, but usually rather thin on the news. I go there to stream audio, not read stories.

The only thing that would make Google News better would be a "Fringe" category -- but I get my weekly dose of that at News of the Weird.