The Google News Dilemma 310
(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."
Bad Grammar...? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Bad Grammar...? (Score:2, Interesting)
Beta ~ Betta' ~ Better
"Better not make money"
Thought this was self evident...
Make money off it? Why? (Score:1, Interesting)
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!
Re:This has been known on Slashdot for some time. (Score:3, Interesting)
3. Ask the porn preview portals how they make $$$.
Could they... (Score:4, Interesting)
AdWords may not be good enough (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
Found a better one anyway (Score:1, Interesting)
It personalizes the articles you get based on the past article you clicked on. Pretty cool and useful.
Still seems like a good thing (Score:5, Interesting)
still buggy, (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
So what. (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:I disagree (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
Re:I disagree (Score:3, Interesting)
Why would the sites complain? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
That's odd because... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Google lawyers never told "Don't be evil" (Score:4, Interesting)
google could also (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyway, for an alternative to google, may I suggest to anyoneTopix [topix.net], a similar news aggregator that claims they pull from even more sources than google. I use both myself, about equally.
Re:Google lawyers never told "Don't be evil" (Score:2, Interesting)
But they aren't Google's headlines, they're others' headlines that Google scraped.
Beeezarre.
Only morons buy into the "do know evil" schtick. Corporations are corporations, neither good nor evil, and utterly predictable.
Google will drown the news in ads, that's the only possible way they can make money.
Alerts as SPAM (Score:3, Interesting)
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'.
Re:This has been known on Slashdot for some time. (Score:4, Interesting)
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".
Re:I disagree (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why would the sites complain? (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, but the big boys will lose. If people go to CNN.com, all of their hits are on CNN. If they go to google news, only a small portion of their hits will be CNN. The more news sites out there, the less chance a certain page will get hit. This is only good for the smaller sites that people don't know about.
Re:I disagree (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Google web-scrapes the latest news (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.fastmail.fm
ad free webmail, with imap access & keyboard access
you should try looking harder
Re:Why would the sites complain? (Score:3, Interesting)
Because Google is offering an equivalent of a good that costs a lot for news services to provide, and which drives a lot of their business.
The way that people use a comprehensive news service like a newspaper, or CNN's web site, is something like this - they skim the headlines to get an idea of what the big stories are, and then they read the one or two articles that look particularly interesting. So there are two distinct types of good here - (1) the overview provided by the "front page" and (2) the details provided by the individual articles. You are right that Google is not significantly taking or replacing the second type of good. But they are replacing the first good, and given the way that consumption of the first good drives consumption of the second type of good, that is a real problem for comprehensive news services.
If the Google approach to news aggregation catches on then comprehensive news services will lose their advantage over more specialised services, and die out.
Re:AdWords may not be good enough (Score:1, Interesting)
The same thing happens on TV. I remember quite recently watching a news story about Tanning Salons possibly leading to cancer. During the break, an advertisement for a tanning salon!
Re:I disagree (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
Topix.net [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
speaking of cease and desist orders... (Score:2, Interesting)
just wondering...
Google, RSS and APIs (Score:2, Interesting)
Just to be clear on the saga, I created gnews2rss.php [voidstar.com] 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 [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 [mailto] and ask for RSS/Atom from News Search (and all the other services) so that I can retire gnews2rss.