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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."
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.
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!
3. Ask the porn preview portals how they make $$$.
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...
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
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
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.
I recently sent this to their "suggest-source" address:
I suggest that you add the following news source:
http://www.kcna.co.jp/index-e.htm
to Google news. It is the official news service of the Democratic
Peoples Republic of Korea.
If not, I am wondering how this is different from Xinhua, another
propaganda organization of a dictorial government, whose articles are
often featured highly on Google news?
Earlier today, it was linked to a parody story, but the Google News page linked to it as if it was a legitimate news article.
But why is the rum gone?
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.
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.
"'Yrch!' said Legolas, falling into his own tongue."
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.
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!
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.
Why do they have to make a profit from Google News anyway ? They make enough money with some of their other services, surely they could allow News to remain as a "loss leader" high profile mindshare venture. They do value the good will they have in the market place, moving News out of beta without changing anything from how it is now, would be a good move in that direction.
Surely "Not everything has to make money" can be reconciled with "don't be evil".
--- There isn't any problem that can't be solved by a small, low yield nuclear device, is there??
It actually comforts me to find what I consider to be propaganda on news.google.com. If you only wish to find journalism which wholely agrees with your world view, then by all means stay away from news.google.com. When it comes to news, multiple contrasting sources will better approximate reality than a monolithic pool.
http://www.kcna.co.jp is quite possibly the best website on the web. Quite seriously, I read them every day. Its like right in our very own world there is a real live Bond villain who has taken over half a country and is now running the news. I read their diatribes, then think of the Dear Leaders awesome haircut; and I think that just maybe, the world is kinda cool for a second.
http://www.fastmail.fm
ad free webmail, with imap access & keyboard access
you should try looking harder
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
That is the popular notion.
A news article provides facts and at least attempts to be unbiased. Opinions pieces are NOT news articles, because they contain boldly stated opinions, and they make no attempt to appear unbiased.
As you point out, any news provided by humans is somewhat biased (for what it chooses to include if nothing else), but that doesn't mean we should just throw in the towel and declare that all news is opinion.
If you're going to say that, why don't we just say that all facts are opinion. You might as well point out the potential for bias in the optic nerve. You never know what kinds of interference might occur between the eye and brain... so why believe anything?
A healthy dose of skepticism is a good thing. But to assume that all journalists have an alterior motive, is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
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
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...
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.