Who’s afraid of Google News?
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 13 November 2006 at 13:38
Tags: Journalism
Andrew Neil’s suggestion that it was time to “talk to Google” about the billions it is making from “our hard earned journalism”, predictably drew the ire of the blogosphere’s new media commentariat.
“Pure bollocks” was the verdict of Matthew Ingram, a technology columnist at the Globe & Mail in Toronto. Neil’s speech, Ingram said, showed that editors “are still clueless about Google News”.
For Paul Bradshaw, “the Google News excuse is fast becoming a cliché in news circles, as newspaper revenues decline and executives cast around for someone to blame”.
Suing Google for indexing your newspaper is “like suing WHSmiths for stocking your newspaper,” Bradshaw argued, referring to the recent cases in Belgium.
Instead of worrying about whether Google is friend or foe, wrote Jeff Jarvis, editors should be asking a different set of questions:
What is Google doing that we should be doing? How can we be doing it? What will Google do next? Can we get there first? And what can Google do that we can’t and how do we take advantage of that? Google is a reality. Arguing about whether it is friend or foe will do no more good than sitting back and watching it do what you should be doing.
Could old media really compete head-on with Google? It’s not as crazy as it sounds. There are plenty of chinks in Google’s seemingly-impregnable armour.
First, Google may dominate the web search business, but has been far less successful in the growing field of vertical search. According to a study released this summer by Hitwise, Google News is only the 28th most-visited news site in the UK, with a 0.4 per cent share of the market.
Second, Google News is slow, and other filtering technologies are outperforming it on speed. Google News results are is based on a systematic crawl of news sites to report. Even with Google’s computing power, this takes time. Last week one blogger documented the spread of an AP report of Donald Rumsfeld being reshuffled out of the Bush cabinet. The story was on social news recommendation sites like Digg, Reddit, and Netscape within minutes, but hadn’t appeared on Google News for around 20 minutes.
In the US, some newspaper groups are attacking Google’s share of the news aggregation pie by supporting competing products. The local news aggregation site Topix.net is backed by a consortium of US regional newspaper giants Gannett, McClatchy Company and Tribune Company, which just pumped an additional $15 million into the venture.
Where’s the UK equivalent?
Tags: Journalism
