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Searching for The New York Times
r.jimenezz writes "Adam L. Penenberg, an assistant professor at New York University, has written an interesting piece over at Wired about the contrast between the New York Times' relevance in the real world and the dismal rankings it gets in modern search engines' results. Penenberg discusses some very interesting ideas about opening up the Times digital archive and the impact this would have on its cyber presence."
I think this touches upon a much larger problem.
Traditionally, libraries were the ultimate source of information. They were organised and well indexed - to help one find what they are looking for.
The internet has become an "instant library" to a lot of us. In ways, the internet is better than a library. Searching is trivial and the amount of information staggering. However, a lot of information is getting lost. I'm aware that there are Archiving sites, but often, these sites cannot index or record the information that sites present from their own MySQL/Oracle databases.
Search engines are really only good for searching a static site, and don't particularly scale well to sites that have content that change frequently.
It all boils down to this: HTML+Search Engine is not a good combination for giving people access to information over a long period of time. Web sites come and go (depending on the interest of their maintainters) and when they go, they're gone for good.
We need to start distributing the content on a global scale - the same way books distribute content among many people.
[ Monday is a terrible way to spend one seventh of your life. ]
In an interesting coincidence, just an hour or so ago, I was looking for an article I read online in the NYT. Specifically, I was looking for an interesting image which was in the article. (Not for any specific use, I just wanted to show a friend.)
Besides the fact that the article is in the archive now (yet less than a month old!) and costs money, the page also informs you that:
Please Note: Archive articles do not include photos, charts or graphics. Our photos are available for purchase, please click here for more information.
Clicking the link reveals that you can order a photographic print for $95, and that's if they have it.
I don't even want a photographic print! A 200x200 pixel bitmap would be fine! (and hardly damaging to their photo sales)
As the article points out, why would anyone casually link to a NYT story? There is simply no point in linking to something most can't access without paying.
They certainly deserve that Google ranking.
From a newspapers perspective open archives aren't always a possiblity. I work for a newspaper in a Moderately sized (~100,000 people) midwestern city. We currently have about 135 years of paper archives dating back the the late 1800's. While we do have a decent internet presence, we don't have the resources to provide this conent online for free.
A recent estimate by me showed that we would need about $20,000 to get that project started in a very barebones manner. That isn't a small amount of money to throw at a project that you want to give away for free. On the other hand their is antoher newspaper in town that charges $90/year for access to their sports archives and at last estimate they had close to 1000 subscribers. For a medium sized paper that amount of money is hard to pass up.
Now for a company like the New York Times that is a different story. They certainly have the resources to get their content online. They though, have other reasons to keep their content available on a pay basis. They maintian strict controls over all their copyrighted material. Its hard to blame them for this though, since that content is their lifeblood.
In my opinion I do feel they keep their content under too tight of a lock. Its like having a great idea but never letting anyone hear about it because you are afraid they might steal it. Papers must decide between keeping their copyrighted material secure and providing it to readers in a new medium. But it is that delecate balance that traditional print publications now face while moving into the digital era.
To have a paper like the New York Times, who can command advertising rates as high as any paper in the world, bitching and moaning about their web presence and hoarding their articles like some stupid info-miser shows nothing more than a complete lack of understanding somewhere in the company. There is no excuse for it.
Uh, I don't know if you realized this, but newspapers ALSO make a lot -- a LOT -- of money on their archives. In fact, in some areas the only reason the local paper survives is an archival entity, selling their content digitally and on microfilm/fiche to universities and to services like Lexis-Nexus.
There is a big fear in the newspaper industry that opening their archives online will destroy this revenue stream without introducing a comparable new revenue. It is a very realistic fear...I used to work for an online newspaper company, and it was quite common to have customers putting up less than half of their print content after seeing massive drop offs in print sales. Many clients would ask us to clear their archives, so you could only search a month back.
I mean, the Times is a respected paper. Their articles are linked to all over the net despite the required registration, and they can expect every self respecting university to buy the year's microfilm roll. Offering the content for free could ONLY hurt them, so they'd be stupid to do so.
Hey freaks: now you're ju