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The Google News Dilemma
(54)T-Dub writes "Wired has an interesting article about the status of news.google.com. It has been 3 years since its release and the major bugs have long since been ironed out, so why is it still in beta? Apparently, it's because Google hasn't been able to figure out how to make money off of it. Slapping up some Google Adwords seems like the obvious solution. The problem is that Google News has multi-million-dollar news publishers scared because of the incredibly low-cost method that Google has employed to bring us 'up the minute news.' Currently they are able to scrape the content of news sites under fair use because they are not using it for commercial purposes. Once they move away from the nonprofit, educational purposes of their system they can expect to be deluged by cease and desist orders. Before you break out the tissue box though, remember that google sent their own cease and desist orders to a Google News RSS feeder a few months back."
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=dilemma&r =67
...visit Google News.
Am I reading it wrong, or is the title of that Wired article (Google News: Beta Not Make Money) really bad grammar? Do they have editors over there?
Moo.
One major bug still exists -- the bot cannot separate news from opinion and other trash. It's a sloppy orgy of miscellaneous content that should somehow be more carefully organized before being released.
1. Create some cool web portal things
:-)
2. Drive traffic to it
3. ??
4. Profit!
Google, like the rest of the world, is still stuck on figuring out #3.
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
well they can still take stories out of your gmail account and present those as news
Then threatens to sue anyone who web-scrapes them.
Oh, but one guy said something warm and fuzzy once about "do no harm" so they're a Good(tm) giant, soulless corporation, like Apple or IBM.
Oh, and thanks for GMail. ABSOLUTE GENIOUS. I was searching high and low for a way to introduce more advertisements into my e-mail, and Google delivered.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Is Beta... until I make some money that is.
So what if Google News doesn't make money? If it's another great product by Google (tm?), then it still reinforces the idea that google does great things.
The financial return from the news portion doesn't have to come in dollars. It can simply come from "good will" and "brand value." Those are items that show up on the balance sheet too.
[rumor]Perhaps google will buy out a news entity in the future[/started]
Support a few technologists in Washington.
So, it's in beta because they haven't figured out how to make money. They can't start charging money for it anyway, since it would no longer be Fair Use.
So, why don't they just use it as a loss leader freebie to keep traffic coming to the site? All they have to do is delete the "Beta" part, after all!
beta not make money
bettah not make money
better not make money
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
You can find more information about google's news problems here:
news.google.com:google+news+beta
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
Google news is still in beta because it can't differentiate between real news and editorials. As much as I like google news, I get most of my news from rss feeds (slashdot/scifiwire ect...) As far as I am concerned, Google needs to either decide to stay nonprofit with the google news, OR pay out the cash and sell adds.
:)
Now that I reread this, it's gonna get modded down... oh well.
In nature, there are neither rewards or punishments, there are only consequences.
wait, you mean google is useful for stuff other than finding porn and fixing linux kernel module compilation errors?
vodka, straight up, thank you!
slap some adwords on there, and then feed the content providers portions of the ad revenue based on some model, click throughs or whatnot? I know online news providers are struggling themselves, and it would incentivize them not to require registration (since I avoid the google links that require a subscription). Yeah, that's obvious enough that they've probably thought of it. Maybe it wouldn't be profitable enough for them, or for the content providers.
The enemies of Democracy are
I run a similar, albeit personalized service (which predates Google News actually) and I'll have to pipe in and say that I doubt that the real reason for the absense of ads on GN is that Google is afraid: first of all, GN drives traffic to news sites, and more traffic means more money for the originating site. Excluding yourself from GN is basically handing money to your competition.
I think the real problem with GN, is that context sensitive advertising does not work for news. I've been running AdSense ads on memigo.com for a while now and Google never managed to keep up: by the time they spidered the site, the content had changed. Now, let's assume that they can solve this problem since GN is their own site, and they can update immediately: which advertisers are going to rely on context ads for news items? Imagine a story popping up on the US feed about say a Ford Explorer flipping over, with nice big Ford ads next to it: a waste of money and space. And if you try to go the other way, showing ads only for positive pieces of news (hard, but let's say it's doable) you'll be accused of bias and selling out.
So, the only reasonable choice is to sell non-context ads on GN. It could happen, but I think Google likes a challenge; they'll mine GN clicks and probably do personalized ads before they go back to plain-old ads...
Obviously there is a plan here, and it is very simple. Google are simply going to let the service run as beta, until it has enough users (and it is getting there) that the shoe is on the other foot: and the news providers will WANT to be screen scraped.
I mean, when news pages start seeing that 90% of their article reads are referred from news.google.com, or that do reader research and find that Google News is the number one way that people learn to read their site, then Google can start gladly removing anybody who asks. I have started reading several newssites regularly that I first found via Google News.
It personalizes the articles you get based on the past article you clicked on. Pretty cool and useful.
I'm not drunk, I just have a speech impediment. And a stomach virus. And an inner ear infection.
It seems to me like Google has always done cool first, money second, and since the cool worked so well the money just seemed to follow. If I was to advise them (like they would listen to a non-PhD programmer like me) I would say to just leave it free and open like it is now. It is a very popular site, and they can always use it as good PR and as a linking mechanism to the rest of the Googleverse.
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
No they do not.
Good Will on a Balance Sheet is the "excess" paid for a company when the acquisition is accounted for using the Purchase Method (the only one now allowed). You take all the acquired company's assets, price them to "fair market value" and make them assets on your book, then whatever premium you paid is "good will." You used to have to amortize Good Will over 40 years (because it isn't real), but now you get to keep it as "brand value" or whatever, and if it ever becomes worth less, you can write it down then.
HOWEVER, developing your own brand value, you can't put that on the balance sheet because how would you value it? Do you think that Google can just say, hmm, Google News is really cool, let's add another $10m this quarter to the good will account. Lookie here, $10m in revenue because we increased this asset?
Before stating that things show up somewhere in financials and give armchair advice, you might want to research what they are.
Good Will on a balance sheet is VERY DIFFERENT from what Good Will is in conventional thought.
Alex
I don't understand why news sites would have an issue with Google News.
Think about it...
1) Google isn't copying the full-text of an article. At most, its the headline and a paragraph...most of the time it is the headline and a sentence.
2) Since Google doesn't post the entire article, you have to click a link that takes you directly to the publisher of the article. Google News is therefor generating millions of direct hits per month to various news sites.
3) These millions of direct hits to these news sites means more advertising dollars for THOSE sites. Since I click link on a NYT Headline listed on Google News, I view *gasp* the NYT web site and its particular article. Which means, any ad dollars I generate there go to the NYT. The horror, the NYT is making more money thanks to Google News then without it (not to mention spreading its name out to more readers, who could purchase even subscriptions).
So am I missing something? Why would news publishers have issues with a site sending millions of hits per month at the news publisher's sites, generating far more money then if Google News didn't exist.
Google does not produce links to "Economist" articles or WSJ articles via the New page. However, via the regular search page, you sometimes see links to such articles. If you clink on the links, they take you to a page requesting that you pay for a subscription to the journals. There is no cached version of them.
On the other hand, if you are a low-quality journal like "New York Times", then you have plenty to fear.
By the way, do try Yahoo News, which is much better than Google News.
They should make TWO news sites. One that takes contributions/payments/whatever from news sites, and that can be used to "help" their stories get "bumped". Then on the SECOND news site, keep it completly "evil free". Oh wait, thats just for my amusement, nvm.
My current employment is beta, until I make some money that is.
Better still was that the aformentioned Bison's (who were on there way to there 3rd straight win) had a whopping 10 articles written about them, the Patriot Act story only had 4 articles listed. I had to take a screen cap and e-mail it out to people. It was hillarious, I guess none of the news orgs had picked up the AP story at that point.
I boycott signatures
Those things are annoying, and deceptive. They have GOT to go. If you have to ask yourself how to profit off the news, then maybe you're not sparkling example of corporate good will everyone says...
Aggregate news sites are the future, because unfortunately, no single media outlet can be trusted with the burden of relaying reality anymore.
I honestly don't think Google should be sued for presenting news from other sources. After all, Google News is just summarizing the pages it finds and linking to them... just like regular Google does. In fact, many webpages get additional hits because of Google News. It isn't really at all different from any other search engine except that the contents are limited to current events.
That being said, I know there's a difference between how things should be and how things are. So you don't need to explain why someone can sue them. No one ever promised you couldn't be successfully sued for millions of dollars for no good reason.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
If they're going to use "Ads" to generate "revenue" from what should, in all conscience, be considered a public resource (since its public news, from public sources), then they ought to -really- sell Ads.
What I mean is, open the Ad-space to *all*, not just multi-million-dollar accounts.
If the only $-proposition to be made from Google harvesting and data-crunching publicly sourced material is founded in their unique ability to go from "idea -> Working System -> Cultural Meme -> Brand Reality", then they ought to be being really agressive about it, and working out how to use the culture of their audience, to exploit the Ad-space.
Give me the ability to easily push a message to a few million users on a Friday afternoon, give me good stats about it and reasons to want to use Google to push that message a couple times a day. I'd use that, hell yeah. (I'm an active online artist
All Google need do is implement a "no single Ad twice in the same 24 hours" (or less) and open up a no-nonsense portion of their massaged content to a public RSS-style feed, and they've got a money-maker
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Google News is still valuable to Google, even if they cannot make money off it.
It is a free service provided for the public that give Google great publicity and a positive image. It does build their brand.
So, even if you consider it as a loss leader in marketingspeak, it is still valuable to them.
Now, as an alternate strategy, if they start providing ads for the news outlets themselves? Would the news outlets complain then?
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
"Apparently, it's because Google hasn't been able to figure out how to make money off of it.
;)
At $135 per share, I'm thinking somebody has fgured out how to make money off of it
You need a FREE iPod Nano
You don't get any useful information from that excerpt. You're going to click on the link, which will take you through to the ABC News page. And that page has got ads on it! I just learned how Olay face cream can improve my complexion. So because of Google News, ABC got a page view for its advertiser that it wouldn't have gotten otherwise. The same with the other pages that Google links to.
It seems that all Google has to do is to get permission from sites to link to their stories. The ones that refuse are giving up a source of revenue. Why would any commercial site not want the most popular site in the world to link to them? Jeez, Google should be charging sites for the right to be indexed by Google News.
I've not really thought of google competing with news sources. Why? Because the first thing that I do is open a tab into that news site. Honestly, I don't trust google for news. They are o.k. for getting an overview at a few things that may have been unknown to you. Depending on google for news is like depending on slashdot for balanced reporting and good editing.
a search on google.com will bring up relevant news articles, and yet also displays ads just like any other search...
How is that any different than displaying ads on news.google.com itself? In any case, because they are already displaying these News Results, seems to me that they are *already* profiting from Google News.
the best plan to make money is to hold other news sites hostage. Good ole extortion, that's a great way to make money. Offer to make Google News worse if the 10 largest competitors pay up proper.
"'Yrch!' said Legolas, falling into his own tongue."
www.findory.com
Google can tell them dudes if they don't like to be in the news they aggregate, just because they whip a few ads on the side of the page, no probs! Pull em out! They could ALSO stop listing them in their search engine AT ALL. google could even CHARGE MONEY to be in their news aggregator for that matter, at least for for-profit commercial news. They still have a lot of options available to them to combat "copyright" hysteria by the providers. Maybe we could even get rid of "subscription/registration required" news feeds being the top listings most of the time as well. I hates 'em I do. I already wrote google and asked them for a filter for that, I do NOT want to establish a subscription and login/password for one thousand different news websites out there, and eat a thousand more cookies, etc. I just as soon they didn't even show up in the google news feed. I'll take regular old traditional internet rules, "here's my website, go ahead and look at it, that's what it's for".
Anyway, for an alternative to google, may I suggest to anyoneTopix, a similar news aggregator that claims they pull from even more sources than google. I use both myself, about equally.
Journalists seem to think they're funnier than everyone else and come up with stupid puns and plays on words far too often. IMHO it enforces the opinion they don't take writing the articles very seriously, either. Maybe they're all trying to get mentioned by Jay Leno on his cure for insomnia show.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I tend to keep track of news from more traditional news websites and use Google news when I want to see a lot of articles on a particular subject. If a really big story happens locally, Google news probably won't be the fastest to report it until it gets wider coverage.
It's worse than that. Often headlines include (UPDATED) and first letters of articles are missing, possibly because they are a graphic capital letter.
Still, I go there before I go anywhere. Beats the heck out of CNN.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Well, if we are to take my account's spam folder as reference, it seems a bug they have yet to fix is that their auto-generated alerts are junk-mail-like enough to fool gmail's own filters.
On one hand, it's reassuring to know that not even google.com is whitelisted from the algorithms but, on the other, it's really annoying to need to mark each and every one of them as 'Not spam'.
Sailors. Oh man!
Target the news organizations as customers and not news consumers. Tell news organizations that their web sites will get top linking if they pay some subscription fee. Not only will they get top billing on the news page, there could be a link where searches also have a NewsWords feature in addition to AdWords. For example, a search on volcanoes may have 2-3 links to news stories about Mt St Helens.
Small/niche/local sites can subscribe and get more traffic thrown their way. Big news sites may eventually follow.
> So what if Google News doesn't make money?
Google news have the potential to make a LOT of money, but not directly. Once you are addicted to them for getting your news, they can mix up the news sources in whatever way they seem fit. Of course every newspaper or magazine can misinform you and all of them do it, but in the case of google, the other newspaper you will read for getting a second opinion will be what google chose! Having the power to tell people what to read, is a GREAT power. Before you know it, google news will elect the next president of the US.
I noticed Froogle has been in "beta" for almost as long... yet I use is extensively and find it works better than most all the other price comparison engines.
Dang... I wish everyone had betas so good they were basically production quality. ;)
http://www.google.com/googleblog/2004/09/china-goo gle-news-and-source-inclusion.html
Subscribe for free to my show!
I believe Google is working perfectly. If a news story is just breaking and only one or two wires have even come out with the breaking news then it is not likely many syndicators have carried the coverage yet.
Google aggregates popular news stories. It does not monitor the wires directly.
Google has merely reduced the broadcast news biz to its essentials. Very little reporting is performed by the news services; most is received from their wire service subscriptions. And even those stories are validated against what the other services run. They won't run maverick stories that run counter to the spin from the other news organizations. The classic analysis of this "pack journalism" is the fun read, The Boys on the Bus, by Hunter S. Thompson fellow-traveller Tim Crouse. Manufacturing consensus of the "official America" is a big, complex business, and Google is both simplifying it and tearing off its mask with their cross-reference engine.
--
make install -not war
Sorry, I'm not an accountant, I was trying to illustrate a point.
:)
:)
What he was advocating was essentially capitalizing an expense, which wouldn't be revnues, but would decrease expenses, which would hit the income statement, and the amortized amount would be less than 1m.
Yes I enjoy nitpicking...
The point remains, his comment just showed a lack of understanding, MAJORLY.
Do things like that generate good will for Google, absolutely.
Do they hit the financials as he was stating? Absolutely not.
The posters point was that these things show up on financials, my point is that they don't.
Alex
Looks like they're gearing up to fight a potential invasion. ;) Wake up, guys, your people don't need
martial arts books as long as they live on grass
for lack of a proper food supply.
For decades, multi-billion dollar companies have thrown millions of dollars at advertising agencies in order to promote their products.
In this cut-throat business (which is fundamentally based on deception in order to make more money) the advertisers threw cash liberally. Now, people seem to be rejecting advertising and have the ability to pick and choose via the internet.
Where does advertising go from here?
you may not be able to see the difference, but well, thats you. the rest of us have a clue.
--
Try Nuggets , the mobile search engine. We answer your questions via SMS, across the UK.
Any sufficiently advanced form of humor is indistinguishable from gibberish.
(As adapted from the phrase, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," popularized by Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote books. Perhaps you've heard of him. The interesting bit, of course, is Clarke's implied criticism of the individual who views the science as magic. Examine this, apply it to your own comment, and report back.)
First of all, I can't see how a major offering from a for-profit company can be classified as "not commercial". "Non-profit" doesn't just mean that you're failing to make any money. Even if they don' have ads on this specific section of their site, the *whole thing* is a big ad for Look How Cool And Useful Google Is.
Adding advertising might cause the site to push the site's whose content they are linking to over the edge, but I don't really see how one can even argue that there's a fundamental difference.
Likewise, there's not a fundamental difference between Google News and the main Google search site, which _does_ have paid advertising.
And in both cases, sites which _wouldn't_ want to be indexed seem pretty silly. If you don't want people to find your web site, okay, keep it out of the search engines. Or save your money and don't put it on the web at all. This isn't a matter of fair use doctrine -- it's common sense.
They could show ads, just like on the rest of their site - based on the searches and not the news items being shown.
For all I know this could be FUD from Microsoft, who is introducing a simlar service, but personalized.
For anyone who has a similar site that isn't being spidered by Google, the answer is simple. Use random URL's so that Google is forced to re-index any page every time it loads because the actual URL is different. domain.com/?1 domain.com/?2 are two different URL's and Google will spider each one on the spot.
Someone has figured out how to screw with google news, or it's a funny glitch...
... CJAD
Bush, Kerry Hope to Win Voters in Debate ABC News
Straits Times - USA Today - Reuters - Indian Express - all 1,068 related
at time of posting, front page has this article
Get 50 Commission Free Trades
CBS MarketWatch - 1 hour ago
The first of three scheduled head-to-head match-ups between President Bush and Democratic challenger John Kerry will focus solely on foreign policy issues. TV showdown between Bush and Kerry could determine election
Topix.net factors in site registration when it decide which articles to show. Given ten copies of the same/similar story it will bias the source selection to ones that do not require registration.
-AS
There isn't a clear line between "real news" and editorials in any case. Editorials sometimes break news, news is often opinionated. The most careful attempts at "balance" introduce their own bias; by presenting two "sides", the author strongly implies that the truth is somewhere in between, when both "sides" might be biased in the same direction and truth happens to be elsewhere.
Once they move away from the nonprofit, educational purposes of their system they can expect to be deluged by cease and desist orders. Before you break out the tissue box though...
I doubt many people get that excited about cease and desist orders...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Where does advertising go from here?
Popups, spam and spyware. Oh wait. That's already been thought of...
1) How much value did Google provide for the article? Google is reaping a huge benefit by providing this service (name recognition for one). The fact that they have the 14th most recognized traffic visiting this webpage brings a certain sort of panache to Google (as well as attracting web users and potential advertisers). 2) Don't you think CNN would much rather have you leave your homepage as their website vs. being on Google's? Because Google provides you the ability to jump directly to the article, you don't need to know which publisher made this article available to you. A lot of readers just peruse the article and move on, never realizing who published it. 3) Of course, if you were a NYT reader in general (because they have a good reputation and produce a superior product), you would be viewing the ads on their homepage (which would be more expensive because it should be their most viewed webpage) and ads located on the web pages of the articles themselves (plus any other articles that might have interested you). You would have many more hits than the current method Google provides. I personally like the convenience that GN provides, but I view this service as a big win for Google and very minor win for the major news agencies that spend all of the money needed to produce the news. If Google does start to sell advertising on this site, I think that the major news sources will have a legitimate complaint against Google.
does slashdot get flooded with these, considering the amount of content not available elsewhere is next to nil, and the site has ads which presumably produce revenue?
just wondering...
that on the ad on this story, there is the Google ad that states:
"Can your website make you even more money?"
Maybe they should take their own advice...
I believe it quite possible that you, sir, are an insensitive clod. Some of us are quite capable of both using computers and writing legible sentences, with no grammar mistakes and quite a bit of meaning too, thank you very much. It is this odd belief some people hold, that humans can only be good at one thing at a time, that drives intelligent people up the figurative walls of their minds.
Conversely, you could be working for Donald Rumsfeld...
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. -- G.B. Shaw
The best feature of Google News was the link to "News Resources" which was simply a list of various international news outlets. If slashdot had ever made that list, it would have replaced my home page :-)
I suspect that page may still be there someplace, but I can't find it.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
I almost never use Google news.
It's just not useful and the lack of an Atom feed (Yes I prefer Atom over RSS) bothers me.
Yes it's kind of fun but not all that useful and it's fraught with errors.
It's too easy for people to use the search and end up finding news from disreputable sources and then IM spamming their friends with something no better than an Onion article.
Not to mention it added yet another button to Google's font page there by taking it one step closer to being Yahoo, how long before headlines show up on the start page and ads for "Music At Google" featuring Britney Spears and "Cool Camera Phones" from AT&T
Google News top headline July 27 2009:
"Google has become Yahoo"
As long as their other works are doing well... there isn't much of a need to make money off of it directly.
Call it value added google content. It attracts more users and can add that extra content niche they need to attract more users.
Given the way it gets its feeds... its only a engineering support cost.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
As soon as most people can separate opinion from "the news"...
I think a good start would be filtering stuff titled "Editorial" and "Op-ed" at least on the English sites. There should be some easy keywords and such they could filter on... with the number of PhDs they've got, should be no prob.
Then there is the issue of mangled reuters stories on chinese sites designated "English News"... "IBM creates fastest super model in the world" -Xinhua
What's the deal with that? How about a pass through the google grammar/spelling checker too... before deciding rankings.
I hate clicking on an interesting headline only to find out it's someone's diatribe attack monkey troll article.
Interactive Visual Medical Dictionary
omg, I completely agree. http://www.kcna.co.jp is by far the funniest thing I've read in a few weeks. It's as if you took the craziest, most paranoid person in the world, and gave them a blog to write what they experienced each day. Everything (even the one today about objecting to the S Korean army 'practicing' in Iraq) is so blindingly pro-N Korea. I could see people actually believing it though, as it is (probably) their only news source.
;)
Google should add this site to their list, but I don't know if the parsing filters would match them to the correct stories.
0- Eamonman Proud member of DNRC
I wonder how his bandwith costs look now that he was
The next time my mother-in-law asks why I don't make more money, I'm going to tell her I'm in Beta.
You beta tell'er your in coma.
News producers have nothing to fear from Google.
Why?
Because Google does not create, i.e., write, any news. It simply points to news at websites that it has crawled.
Google is competing with businesses that also collect, sort, and present news created elsewhere. Google is not competing with any business with an editorial staff that covers stories and creates news.
Remember, Google has no reporters, writes no stores, takes no photographs, and would have nothing to display but an empty page unless it could suck content from real news sites.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Google doesn't need to make money from Google News. As other engines begin to match Google's search usefulness, Googles needs more perks to keep it attractive.
Google have similar wait times to exit beta as ICQ and Friendster....i.e. perpetuity
*sigh* and I was hoping a better source than CNN.com
Did you mean: dilemma
"It's the smell! If there is such a thing." Agent Smith - The Matrix
sites, not site's.
how about having adsense links from people's pages that directly link to selected news events in google news?
i know blogger now is now inviting its users to include google targeted ads in their page. a lot of people blog about current events, say the presidential election. the blog would have targeted ads aiming towards a list of news sites that are related that may, or may not share the same views as the person that wrote the blog.
my blog
the google news feed is dominated by off
the wall stories printed in out of the way
venues spammed to the top by aggressive
advocates who have learned how to abuse
the algorithm. google is not the news but
a parody of the news.
Orkut is another Google project still in beta, and I'm surprised a) how friggin slow the site is and b) how problematic routine tasks like logging in are. Nearly half the time I try to log in I get a runtime error.
Now I realise the server(s) are under stress with the growing population of Orkutites, but come on, the amount of problems makes me wonder how seriously they want to make this social networking scheme work.
Btw, the only way you can join Orkut is by invitation. Ask me and I'll endorse your membership.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
Your mail gets read by whom? Maybe the TIA program which Google is becoming a part of?
Think of the difference between the main google websearch page which delivers profit, and the news page. Basically there is little difference.
The way I see it, they could easily implement the news page by having the user type "news" in the search form on the websearch page. The websearch page itself already returns aggregated information, so why would this be legitimate, while for an aggregated news-page it would not?
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
So does this mean that Julian Bond, or someone like of him, can turn this fair-use issue on its head by simply moving the aggregation point from the server to the client?
I'm the Julian Bond mentioned in the post.
Just to be clear on the saga, I created gnews2rss.php as a quick hack to scrape Google news searches and turn them into RSS. I released the source as public domain and quite a lot of people are now running it round the web. I include some dummy reminders in the items a couple of times a month to ask people to host it themsleves and to email Google asking for them to produce the RSS themselves.
A few sites (including Ecademy.com which I run) were re-publishing the RSS on public web pages. We all received emails from Google asking us to stop. They're beef was with the re-publishing, not the scraping. I've never had Google ask me to take down the software or to stop scraping their site, only to stop re-publishing. So there's an implied sense that scraping Google for your own personal use in a personal RSS aggregator is not a problem.
The real issue here is that for all Google's cleverness and services, they don't produce any metadata. And their SOAP API hasn't changed or been added to in 2 1/2 years. I would love to see Search, Image, News, Froogle and so on produce RSS (or Atom, I don't care) and have a decent REST, XMLRPC or SOAP interface. Yahoo! with their news search and services like Technorati, Blogdex, Flikr and many others (evan Amazon and eBay) are pushing the boundaries out here. While Google seems to be just turning itself into another portmanteau portal by copying key features from MSN, Yahoo and AOL.
The second and related issue is that Google (like all the other search engines) do absolutely nothing with XML, RSS, RDF, FOAF and all the other rich structured data that gets lumped into something called the "Semantic Web". There's at least 15 million of these files out there now, but all the major search engines do with them is treat them like TXT files.
So please email Google and ask for RSS/Atom from News Search (and all the other services) so that I can retire gnews2rss.
It seems they're using bad grammar to make a really bad pun
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
Journalists need only write an article about opinions being passed as news so the audience can feel secure again. Like the recent crap with the old military guy verifying stuff about Bush, they were all about (there for a while) how much work goes into checking and double checking sources. LOL. Of course they have a web of trust, and I'm sure it's great and all... :)
What is the difference between google news and the google search engine. Both lift content from sites and display it. If google's commercial search engine happens to return results from a news site or any other copyrighted site, then they could be sued.
Google has proved that an automated news site can be run, and run well. Given that, it is inevitable that such a site shall continue to exist.
Now, I hope that Google is able to continue to be the provider. And I hope they find a way to make money from their site ... they deserve it.
So I see google continuing to hang on for at least another couple of years, looking for the right business model for Google news. Perhaps having articles like this out in the open will prompt someone (probably from one of the major news sites they spider) to come forward with some kind of idea or deal. Eventually, though, if they do not make money, they will be forced to make a decision: keep Google news up as a gift to the community, as a loss-leader funded by profits from their other services, or else shut it off.
Meanwhile, though, given the fact that Google has demonstrated that an automated news site can be built and run well, it is almost certain that somebody else will try. In fact, I'd take it as a given that ultimately there will be open source software to do the same thing. Oh, of course, it won't work as well at first, but it will improve over time. And since it (probably) won't be tied to a company, perhaps the programmers will find a way to distribute the load so as to make it cost effective: P2P automated news, or a network of mirror sites, or something.
Plain and simply, there is a lot of stuff being done on the web for free. I don't (presently) pay for slashdot; I don't pay to search Google or its news site, I don't pay to read most news stories. I even run a web forum which is, of course, made available to members for free. But our members understand that our site costs money, which is why several of them have offered to help the site out financially. Even if Google News itself is not a viable moneymaker, I can very well see some new implementation of the same idea supported by user donations, like public television (or Wikipedia for that matter).
So to me it is inevitable that some form of high-quality automated news site will continue to exist. Either Google will make Google news profitable, or they will keep it available as a loss-leader, or some other folks will make something similar available funded by their own wealth or donations.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
...I can't believe you are the first person to point this out. Notice how when you click on a NY Times story from Google, you don't have to register? This is because the NY Times sends Google special links to make it easier for the user to click through to the story!
Don't like appearing on Google News? Ever heard of robots.txt?
I know of a number of sources lobbying Google to be included on Google News, but don't know of that many lobbying to be taken off (which Google would do on request if you happen to be that insane.)
I can think of one obvious reason why Google would continue to run Google News in some sort of beta/loss-leader mode: To deny anyone else the market until they *do* figure out how to make money from it.
While they may not be making any money off of it, so long as Google & Yahoo control the lion's share of the "news aggregation" market, they are effectively insultated from an upstart competitor taking it away from them by thinking of an angle/model that has not yet occurred to them.
It's a long-term risk management strategy, not a short-term cashflow strategy. Pretty smart, if you ask me.