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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.
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!!!!
It's a play on "betta not make money" or "better not make money"
It's artistic license -
Beta ~ Betta' ~ Better
"Better not make money"
Thought this was self evident...
Do we have editors over here?
Face it - tech news is the field for people who really sucked at both technical writing and journalism. You're not going to find the best writers aspiring to be techno-journalists.
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.
Wired not work good beer without.
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?
Tarzan like job at wired but miss jungle.
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 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
"Oh no! Beta!"
-Snake, from The Simpsons
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.
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
A large percentage of 'headline' humour falls into this type of word-play. The pronounciation isn't as important as it's proximity.
Additional forms of wordplay might include pattern repetition. An example might be "Lloyd's Lloses Llamas" as a headline if Lloyds of London had to settle a claim to a llama farmer.
If it's in print, it's not how it sounds, but how it looks.
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.
"Google News: Beta Not Make Money" is a pun!
"Google News Better Not Make Money" or else they'll be sued because it will have become commercial use, see?
Why stop there?
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.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
"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."
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!
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.
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. ;)
As someone once told me after looking at my personal weblog, "Here's a piece of advice, fire all your geeks and hire one news guy."
There are people capable of producing news in a timely manner without nearly the writing and editing deficiencies suffered by Slashdot and other technology news sources. Business news comes to mind, as does legal news.
We're smart people - we just can't seem to find anyone with an English degree to write for us.
--
Try Nuggets , the mobile search engine. We answer your questions via SMS, across the UK.
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.
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.
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.