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Tag: google news

  • ‘Google Tax’ Law Could Lead Google To Shut Down Google News In Spain

    Spain reportedly passed a law last week that requires sites linking to articles published by those in the country’s newspaper association with snippets – as Google and other search engines do – to pay a tax. This is being referred to in the press as a “Google tax”.

    It’s a new development in an otherwise old story. Publishers (especially throughout Europe) don’t like not getting paid by Google, which links to their sites. Many smaller publications would love to simply have visibility in Google News, as well as the traffic that it can drive, but time and time again, we see publishers raising a stink over it. It’s been going on for years. Sometimes the governments get involved, as we’re seeing now with Spain.

    The law has passed in one house, and is expected to in the other.

    Google got around a similar law in Germany by making Google News opt in. The thinking is that Spain’s version is taking what happened in that country into account, and making things more difficult for the search engine. Julia Alonso has an in-depth post about the law on Medium, and writes:

    The Spanish law proposal declares that editors cannot refuse the use of “non-significant fragments of their articles” by third parties. However, it creates a levy on such use to compensate editors and declares it an inalienable right (derecho irrenunciable).

    The introduction of the inalienable right was done to avoid what happened in Germany. If you are a digital editor that publishes with a copyleft license, like myself, and you minimally understand how the internet actually works, you cannot decide to not charge Google News. It is compulsory. More than a right it is an obligation. Therefore, Google cannot exclude sites requiring payment from Google News. It would still need to pay for those it includes, even if they do not want to be compensated.

    Some expect Google to just pull Google News out of Spain if all of this comes to fruition, which is looking like a distinct possibility.

    Image via Google

  • Google’s 20% Reported To Be Dead, Then Reported To Be Not Dead By Same Publication

    Update: Quartz has posted a follow-up after Googlers came out and said that 20% time is still part of the company’s culture.

    Google has long had an interesting approach to innovation called 20% time, which has historically enabled Google employees to take one day out of each work week to work on side projects, which if good enough, could go on to become real Google products and/or features. Now, that’s apparently no longer happening.

    Quartz says it spoke with some former Googlers, who wished to remain anonymous, who told them that 20% time no longer exists.

    20% time ushered in products that would become staples of Google like AdSense, Google News and Gmail. Here’s a Google engineer talking about it in 2006:

    I love what I do (I work for Google’s Partner Solutions Organization, writing internal programs and tools to help better manage our partner relationships–check out our job listings), but Google’s “20 percent time” recently came in handy. The 20 percent time is a well-known part of our philosophy here, enabling engineers to spend one day a week working on projects that aren’t necessarily in our job descriptions. You can use the time to develop something new, or if you see something that’s broken, you can use the time to fix it. And this is how I recently worked up a new feature for Google Reader.

    I really like the keyboard shortcuts in Gmail, and they work in Reader too. But when using Reader, I found myself wanting to skip whole sections of stories, and I was wearing out my “N” key (which moves the browser down one item). There are buttons on the screen to scroll up and down a whole page at a time, but I thought it would be nice to have a keyboard shortcut too. I could have hacked something together with Greasemonkey or a Firefox extension, but that would’ve only helped me and the three other people who read my blog.

    So I fired off an email to the Reader team, hoping that they’d be able to add a keyboard shortcut. The team got back to me right away, and they told me how easy it would be to add the shortcut myself. They were right–it was easy, because the internal documentation was good and the code was really easy to work with. Once my change had been reviewed, it went live.

    Well, I guess that didn’t work out too well in the end. We all know what happened to Reader, but this is an interesting anecdote about how 20% could work from idea to implementation.

    But the end of 20% time is not a complete surprise, given the many talks Larry Page has given about focusing on key products since coming back as CEO.

    Back in Page and Sergey Brin’s famous founders letter when Google went public, the co-founders touted the 20% as a significant contributor to the company’s innovation (and with Gmail, AdSense and Google News, it clearly was the case).

    Here’s the relevant portion:

    We encourage our employees, in addition to their regular projects, to spend 20% of their time working on what they think will most benefit Google. This empowers them to be more creative and innovative. Many of our significant advances have happened in this manner. For example, AdSense for content and Google News were both prototyped in “20% time.” Most risky projects fizzle, often teaching us something. Others succeed and become attractive businesses.

    At least there’s still Google[x], which in all fairness, has been responsible for Google’s most interesting innovations of late (self-driving cars, Google Glass and Project Loon).

    Google also killed Google Labs a couple years ago.

  • Google Is Showing Old Content Like It’s New

    Google News is showing news stories as much more recent than they actually are. While it’s unclear if this is a bug on Google’s part or a way publishers are gaming the system, it is happening fairly frequently.

    Do you feel some publishers are getting unfair advantages in Google News search results because of this issue? Does it significantly hurt the Google News experience or is it just not that big a deal? Let us know what you think.

    This is something I’ve noticed in the past, but never really gave a lot of thought to, but Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land has now called Google out on it, and shares a statement from the company:

    “We are aware of this issue and working quickly to improve the experience for users.”

    Not incredibly informative, but at least the company is acknowledging that the issue exists, and is apparently working to fix it. The word “quickly” is debatable, however.

    Schwartz first wrote about the issue on his Search Engine Roundtable blog last Friday, and it’s still happening. At SEL, Scwhartz shares an example of a USA Today story about House of Cards getting Emmy nominations showing up as 14 minutes old, despite having been posted over 24 hours earlier.

    I searched for “house of cards emmy” on Wednesday to see what would come up, and I didn’t immediately see that particular story, but I did see one from Suburbanite, which Google News said was 5 hours old. When I clicked through to the article, it said it was posted on July 18th (last Thursday) – even older than the USA Today piece.

    Google News showing old content

    Google news shows old content

    I tried some queries again on Friday. Still happening, often multiple times for the same query, and on the first page of results.

    Here’s one from Vulture listed as “1 hour ago,” even though the article literally says it was posted “yesterday”.

    Vulture - Orange is the New Black

    Vulture orange

    Here’s one from CNET listed as 6 hours ago (in the top news box, no less), while the article is actually from the previous day – almost a full day earlier.

    CNET, Netflix

    CNET Netflix

    This example is particularly interesting, because the result also appears in the Universal Search news box for a simple “netflix” query on Google Web Search, giving it much more visibility. The news box appears only after the paid listing and organic result for Netflix.com.

    Old results as new

    So, basically, at this moment in time, Google is saying this is the third most relevant result for a Netflix query (not counting ads, Knowledge Graph or sitelinks). To be clear, I have no problem with the article, and it might be a fine result, but it’s definitely older than six hours. It’s not that fresh.

    For that matter, all three stories Google shows in the news box here (again, for a simple “netflix” query) are about the same thing despite there being plenty of other Netflix-related topics in the news. They debuted a new original show on Friday, for example, which would seem like a logical fit. Why not show three different stories in the news box instead of three versions of the same story? The query was not about Google’s Chromecast.

    I’m sure I could spend all day finding more examples. These were very easy to find, but I think you get the idea.

    Google has often emphasized freshness a key ingredient in search rankings. You would think that in the News vertical this would be an even more key ingredient. However, when users are looking for fresh content and click the articles that are labeled with fresh timestamps, they expect to see actually fresh content. This is really something Google needs to fix, especially if it’s not going to bring back the realtime search feature.

    Do you see old content labeled as new in Google results very often? Let us know in the comments.

  • Google News Adds Sports Scores & Weather, Expands Editors’ Picks

    Google announced a trio of new features for Google News: new sections for sports scores and weather, and the expansion of the “Editors’ Picks” section.

    Google has been getting better with sports scores over the past year or so, and is now adding a new section utilizing the same information to Google News homepage and sports page. It shows snapshots of live, recently concluded and imminent sporting events. From there, you can also find related info about games and matches. The section, like much of the rest of Google News, is also customizable. You can turn off sports you’re not interested in, for example.

    For now, it’s only available in the U.S., but Google says it will soon expand into more countries, and will also include more sports.

    The new weather section appears in the right-hand column on the homepage.

    “With a quick glance, this section lets you see the 4-day weather forecast starting from today,” says Google News product manager Anand Paka. “The weather section is ‘smart’ – it defaults to show the weather for your current location. (As with local news, you can set this location manually.) We think this is a neat feature as you can track local weather conditions right next to the top stories without having to jump elsewhere to get this information.”

    Finally, the Editors’ Picks section, previously available on the homepage, is being extended to section pages.

  • Google Gets Around Having To Pay German Publishers By Making Google News Opt-In

    A law was passed in Germany several weeks ago that would require search engines like Google to pay publishers to license content to include links and snippets in aggregation services like Google News. Google has been vocally opposing this law and others like it for quite some time, but nevertheless, it passed.

    In light of this, Google has decided to, rather than pay publishers, make Google News opt-in, so they don’t have to. This could mean less content diversity in the product, but Google appears confident that enough publishers will actually want to be included that it will rely on the opt-in scenario.

    Google discussed the changes in a blog post. The post is in German, but here is a portion of it as translated by Google Translate:

    In light of this development, and in light of the legal uncertainty that comes from the law, we have a new confirmation system introduced. With this we offer German publishers another way to tell us whether their contents (continued) to be displayed in Google News. This new confirmation statement is an addition to the existing technical possibilities for publishers to determine for themselves whether their contents to be displayed in our services – or not. Such tools such as robots.txt be recognized alongside Google and many other search engines and Internet services.

    In all other countries, we will maintain in force, proven process: if a publisher makes its content available on the net, they are included in Google News. If publishers do not wish to be included in Google News, you can use a variety of technical options (robots.txt, meta tags) use to prevent indexing by Google – or simply tell us that their content will not be recorded. This is the best way to ensure that a wide variety of publishing votes are represented in our service -., Not just those who have the administrative resources and the time for such processes the digital future presents many industries with new challenges and opportunities. The news industry is one of them. We have always made ​​it clear during the discussions on the related right that we want to continue working with publishers together on solutions.

    The law can be found here (in German).

    Google has taken different approaches to working with publishers in other countries. In Belgium, for example, Google reached an agreement with publishers where Google advertises its services on publishers’ media, and publishers “optimize their use of AdWords”. Google said it would also work with Belgian French-language publishers to help increase publishers’ revenu, collaborating on ways to make money with paywalls and subscriptions, and with AdSense and Google’s ad exchange.

    Earlier this year, in France, Google agreed create a €60 million fund called the DIgital Publishing Innovation Fund to “help support transformative digital publishing initiatives for French readers.” Google said it wouldl also “deepen” its partnership with French publishers to help increase their online revenues using Google’s ad technology.

  • Google May Soon Pay Publishers In Portugal

    Publishers in Portugal want Google to pay for the right to include links and snippets of articles in Google News. The story is always the same from country to country. In recent months, we’ve seen Google playing ball with publishers, and it seems other countries are seeking solutions similar to those Google has proposed elsewhere.

    Reuters is reporting:

    Alberico Fernandes, head of the Portuguese Confederation of Social Communication Media, told Reuters that the global Internet services group’s Iberian and Portuguese units rejected the demand at a first meeting last week but agreed to continue negotiations.

    He said Google “showed readiness to collaborate with media groups to help us modernize and make our content more profitable”, something it had agreed to do in France earlier.

    Earlier this year, Google announced an initiative to “help stimulate innovation and increase revenues” for French publishers. Google agreed to create a €60 million fund called the DIgital Publishing Innovation Fund to “help support transformative digital publishing initiatives for French readers.” Google said it would also “deepen” its partnership with French publishers to help increase their online revenues using Google’s ad technology.

    The announcement followed a similar one Google made in December, when it reached an agreement with publishers in Belgium after six years of litigation, which saw publishers sue Google claiming that it violated their copyrights by displaying snippets in Google News and linking to cached copies of their pages in Google search.

    As part of the agreement in Belgium, Google said it would advertise its services on publishers’ media, and publishers would optimize their use of AdWords. Google would also work with Belgian French-language publishers to “help increase publishers’ revenue,” collaborating on ways to make money with Paywalls and subscriptions, and with AdSense and the Ad Exchange. Google would also work with Belgian publishers to implement Google+ social tools and launch YouTube channels.

    At the time, Google said it would like to come to similar terms with publishers around the world. Perhaps Portugal is next.

  • Google: That Paid Links Thing Goes For Google News Too

    Google: That Paid Links Thing Goes For Google News Too

    After the whole Interflora paid links fiasco, Google took to its Webmaster Central blog to remind webmasters about the no-nos of paid links and advertorials.

    Today, Google took to the Google News blog to remind bloggers and publishers that the rules apply in Google News too.

    “Credibility and trust are longstanding journalistic values, and ones which we all regard as crucial attributes of a great news site,” writes Google Sr. Director of News and Social Products, Richard Gingras. “It’s difficult to be trusted when one is being paid by the subject of an article, or selling or monetizing links within an article. Google News is not a marketing service, and we consider articles that employ these types of promotional tactics to be in violation of our quality guidelines.”

    “Please remember that like Google search, Google News takes action against sites that violate our quality guidelines,” he adds. “Engagement in deceptive or promotional tactics such as those described above may result in the removal of articles, or even the entire publication, from Google News.”

    You can get a look at the Google News quality guidelines here. Similar language in those says:

    Google News is not a marketing service. We don’t want to send users to sites created primarily for promoting a product or organization, or to sites that engage in commerce journalism. If your site mixes news content with other types of content, especially paid advertorials or promotional content, we strongly recommend that you separate non-news types of content. Otherwise, if we find non-news content mixed with news content, we may exclude your entire publication from Google News.

    “If a site mixes news content with affiliate, promotional, advertorial, or marketing materials (for your company or another party), we strongly recommend that you separate non-news content on a different host or directory, block it from being crawled with robots.txt, or create a Google News Sitemap for your news articles only,” says Gingras. “Otherwise, if we learn of promotional content mixed with news content, we may exclude your entire publication from Google News.”

    Don’t say you weren’t warned. Now we’re wondering what exactly prompted this post. Did Google just bust someone? That appeared to be the motivation for Cutts’ earlier post.

    We’re also wondering whatever came of that recent incident where Google itself was busted with paid links again.

  • Are These Google’s Ranking Signals For Google News?

    Computerworld has a new report out about an old patent of Google’s that is drawing some attention. It looks at ways Google might be ranking content in Google News, which is not only helpful for all publications trying to gain eyeballs from the aggregator, but interesting in light of how Google is dealing with unhappy publishers around the world.

    Does Google News do a good job of ranking content as it should be ranked? Does it favor certain publications too much? Tell us what you think.

    Computerworld reports that the application was filed a year ago, and published in July, but patent analyst Bill Slawki points out that the updated version of the patent from 2003 gets rid of some of the old media ideals.

    Note: We’ve updated as Slawski has pointed this out.

    The patent describes a number of metrics, listed as: the number of articles produced by the news source during a given time period, an average length of an article from the news source, the importance of coverage from the news source, a breaking news score, usage pattern, human opinion, circulation statistics, the size of the staff associated with the news source, the number of news bureaus associated with the news source, the number of original named entities the source news produces within a cluster of articles, the breath of coverage, international diversity, writing style, and the like.

    Slawki notes:

    In February of 2012, a new version of the Google patent was published as a pending application. (A second version was granted in 2012). The third version has the same name as the first version, and it has substantially the same description section as the first version. What’s different is the “claims” section. The claims section of the new version of the patent starts off with:

    1-31. (canceled)

    Gone are things like the “circulation statistics of the news source,” the “number of bureaus associated with the news source,” and other things associated with the kind of journalism that’s done in print.

    Either way, the signals listed are worth taking a look at.

    Now, it’s important to note that just because these are listed as such in the patent, it does not mean that this is the exact recipe to Google’s secret News sauce (which is separate from Google web search). Still, it does tell you some of the stuff Google might be thinking about when it comes to news stories. And of course, ranking in Google News can also put you in regular Google web results for hot news items, via Universal Search.

    It’s hard to say how much weight any one signal would be given, and that would likely fluctuate, anyway, based on the strength of the remaining signals, and an on article-by-article basis.

    The article length metric is painted as a valid one in the Computerworld article, but I wonder how much weight that really should be given. Certainly it depends on the content of any particular article. Additional length does not always make a story better. Sometimes it’s simply added fluff. More text from one source may not be as relevant as less text from the right source.

    Here’s what the patent says about that particular metric (labeled as the “second metric”):

    The average length may be measured, for example, in words or sentences. In one implementation consistent with the principles of the invention, the second metric may be determined by determining the average length of non-duplicate articles produced by the news source. For example, it may be determined that the average length of an article from CNN is 300 words, while the average article length from Amateur News Network is 150 words. Therefore, the value of the second metric for CNN may be 300 and for Amateur News Network may be 150.

    So, based on that description, it would seem that adding additional text to articles regularly, even when it is not needed, would help one better compete with CNN for rankings. Of course, even assuming Google’s secret sauce is comprised of these metrics alone (and remember, “and the like” is listed with the metrics, leading one to believe there are more things Google is looking at), there’s always the chance other signals will be used more strongly in some cases.

    Google does like stories to have substance though. If nothing else, the Panda update taught the web as much. Still, as I discussed with ChaCha CEO (and Panda victim) Scott Jones recently, sometimes a quick answer is really better for the user. It really just depends on the case.

    I wonder how valid the “number of articles produced by the news source during a given time period” metric is too. If given too much weight, one could see this signal easily burying an original source, which could come from anywhere. It wouldn’t serve the niche blog (which might have a great deal more authority on a subject than a big news outlet like CNN) very well when it covers something first (because it is focused on said niche), if the story is later picked up by said big news outlet.

    As Slawki points out, he pretty much made this case about the patent years ago.

    This could, however, be offset by the “importance of coverage from the news source” metric, which appears to basically be how many articles a publication produces on a particular subject. For example, a publication writing 500 articles on the crash of the Columbia Shuttle (example given in patent) should rank better for this particular metric than a publication who only put out 10 articles about it. Depending on the story, this could actually benefit the industry-focused niche blog. Again, it comes down to how Google is weighing these signals against one another.

    Google’s Matt Cutts recently put out a video discussing news stories – specifically whether it”s better to use one article or multiple articles for developing stories. I’m not sure you could call his take on the subject the definitive answer to such a question, but he seems to prefer the one-page route. Interestingly, this seems almost contrary to the signal described above. Of course, one could see how such a metric could be ripe for abuse, but that all depends on how Google is able to fight this kind of spam. I’d still recommend only writing relevant articles, and not just blasting out a bunch of useless stories about a subject.

    You can see further description of each of the metrics by reading the patent here. Scroll down to the “Exemplary Processing” section.

    Google recently launched a new News Keywords meta tag to give it an additional signal for ranking news content. This simply allows publications to include keywords they want their stories to be associated with, making the importance of having such keywords in a title a little less important. At least that’s how Google portrayed the addition.

    Do you think Google is currently doing a good job of getting the right stories in front of users? Do you often see examples of where Google is getting it wrong? Let us know in the comments.

  • For Developing News Stories, Google Says It Prefers One Page To Separate Articles

    After taking a month off, Google’s Matt Cutts is back online, and has put out a new Webmaster Help video. This one talks about news sites, and how to approach developing stories.

    The user-submitted question being addressed is:

    Do you have any specific tips for news sites, which have unique concerns compared with commercial sites? For example, if I have a developing news story, should I keep updating the same page, or create a new one when the content changes?

    Cutts prefers the same page route, keeping the information on a single page updated.

    “If it were me, I would tend to have one page because that’s where all the PageRank can accumulate,” he says. “People don’t get confused. Sometimes you even see people doing multiple stories over several days, and they don’t link those stories together, so from one story you can get to the other story, so you sort of lose a few people through the cracks that way.”

    “Marissa Mayer [former Googler/current Yahoo CEO], in the past, has talked about having living topics, or topic pages, that are really like exhaustive entries about a specific area or type of breaking news,” he says. “You can see something like Wikipedia as another example, where they have one page that just gets richer and more developed. At some point, a news story is over, and you want to move on to creating a new page, but given a certain story, often, I think it can be helpful to add updates, and add more information on the same URL.”

    He goes on to recommend reading Google News documentation and research more about what works for that. He references the recent news_keywords meta tag Google announced (without mentioning it by name), and suggests using authorship.

    The part about PageRank is interesting, and certainly worth considering, but unfortunately, he doesn’t get into how Google (or Google News) treats old articles that are updated (in terms of the freshness element), or the best ways to get these old articles in front of their audiences on their second, third, or fourth (etc.) rounds. Of course, there’s always social media, but in terms of search, it’s not that always that simple.

  • Google Agrees To “Support” Publishers In France

    It looks like Google is paying to link to French publishers’ content.

    Google and publishers in France have not been seeing eye to eye for quite some time. In October, the company spoke out about a proposal by French lawmakers, backed by publishers, which would seek for search engines to license content in order to have the privilege of linking to it.

    At the time, Google’s Director of Public Policy in France said, “The web has led to an explosion of content creation, by both professional and citizen journalists. So it’s not a secret that we think a law like the one proposed in France and Germany would be very damaging to the internet. We have said so publicly for three years.”

    “In order to shed light on the reasons that lead us to believe that this law is detrimental to French users, innovation on the Internet and ultimately to the news publishers themselves, we decided to post the note in its entirety,” he said. “We have always been and remain committed to collaborate with French Publishers associations as they experiment and develop sustainable economic models on the Internet.”

    On Friday, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, announced with President Francois Hollande, two initiatives to “help stimulate innovation and increase revenues” for French publishers.

    Reuters reports it as “a deal on payment of media links,” as described by a Reuters journalist present at the signing.

    Google has agreed to create a €60 million fund called the DIgital Publishing Innovation Fund to “help support transformative digital publishing initiatives for French readers.” Google says it will also “deepen” its partnership with French publishers to help increase their online revenues using Google’s ad technology.

    “This exciting announcement builds on the commitments we made in 2011 to increase our investment in France—including our Cultural Institute in Paris to help preserve amazing cultural treasures such as the Dead Sea Scrolls,” said Schmidt. “These agreements show that through business and technology partnerships we can help stimulate digital innovation for the benefit of consumers, our partners and the wider web.”

    The announcement follows a similar one Google made in December, when it reached an agreement with publishers in Belgium after six years of litigation, which saw publishers sue Google claiming that it violated their copyrights by displaying snippets in Google News and linking to cached copies of their pages in Google search.

    As part of the agreement in Belgium, Google said it would advertise its services on publishers’ media, and publishers would optimize their use of AdWords. Google would also work with Belgian French-language publishers to “help increase publishers’ revenue,” collaborating on ways to make money with Paywalls and subscriptions, and with AdSense and the Ad Exchange. Google would also work with Belgian publishers to implement Google+ social tools and launch YouTube channels.

    At the time, Google had indicated it would like to come to similar terms with publishers around the world, and it looks like today’s announcement is the next step in that.

    It’s going to be quite interesting to see how Google deals with the rest of the countries with publishers who have voiced similar concerns as those in France.

  • Report: Actually, Google May Be Paying About $6M To Publishers

    As previously reported, Google announced this week that it has reached an agreement with publishers in Belgium, ending six years of litigation. Publishers had sued Google claiming they violated copyright by displaying snippets in Google News and linking to cached copies of their pages in Google search. It’s essentially the same argument many publishers have been making for years all over the world.

    Now, however, Google has made an agreement which could have ramifications for how publishers in other countries proceed.

    Google put out a blog post about the agreement, painting the whole thing as a win win situation, but it may not be that simple. While it may not have been as bad as it could have been for Google, it’s likely a bigger win for publishers. Jeff John Roberts at PaidContent points to some other reports, raising a pretty interesting point. He writes:

    Google’s announcement says the parties are “collaborating” to make money but also takes pains to note that “we are not paying the Belgian publishers or authors to include their content in our services”. Oh, really?

    US press outlets have noted Google is paying all the legal fees but have generally framed the deal as a tie or a win for Google. The Europeans, however, have been less gracious. Le Monde‘s triumphant account begins by explaining that the Belgian papers “forced Google to bend” and that Google will “compensate” papers and journalists to the tune of “2 to 3 percent of sales” — or “around 5 million euros” ($6.5 million).

    As he notes, it seems very likely that publishers in other countries who have been fighting similar battles (albeit not always in the same fashion) will pursue similar payoffs. Google, as it mentioned in its blog post, will also be advertising heavily on publishers’ sites, giving them who knows how much more in revenue, though the company says publishers will also be using Google’s ad products.

    In the post, Google Belgium Managing Director Thierry Geerts said, “Many win-win ways exist for Google and publishers to join forces in the new digital universe. We drive traffic to publishers – four billion clicks a month around the globe, offering publishers 100,000 business opportunities per minute. Our AdSense program pays out $7 billion a year to web publishers worldwide. Publishers remain free, with the addition of just a few lines of code, to pull out of Google web search and Google News. Publishers also remain free to determine whether to put their articles discovered through Google search behind a paywall.”

    “Instead of continuing to argue over legal interpretations, we have agreed on the need to set aside past grievances in favour of collaboration,” he added. “This is the same message we would like to send to other publishers around the world – its much more beneficial for us to work together than to fight.” (Emphasis ours)

    Google just may be sending a message to publishers indeed. It just might not be quite as rosy as the one painted in Google’s announcement.

  • Google And Publishers Are Getting Along…In Belgium

    Google has reached an agreement with news publishers in Belgium after six years of litigation. Publishers sued Google claiming they violated their copyright by displaying snippets in Google News and linking to cached copies of their pages in Google search.

    This, as you may know, is a pretty standard fight for Google from country to country, as publishers seek more money for their content throughout the world. Some countries in Europe have proposed laws that would require Google to pay publishers to license content for this purpose, something Google is obviously completely against. In Brazil, publishers have pulled out of Google News on their own.

    In Belgium, they’ve worked things out.

    “We have reached an agreement that ends all litigation and represents great news for both us and the newspapers,” said Thierry Geerts, Managing Director, Google Belgium. “We continue to believe that our services respect newspaper copyrights and it is important to note that we are not paying the Belgian publishers or authors to include their content in our services.”

    Google will advertise its services on the publishers’ media, and publishers will optimize their use of AdWords, Google says, adding that it will work with Belgian French-language publishers to help increase publishers’ revenue, collaborating on way to make money with Paywalls and subscriptions, and with AdSense and the AdExchange. Google says it will also work with publishers to implement Google+ social tools, including Hangouts on news sites, and launching YouTube channels. Finally, Google and publishers will collaborate on the distribution of original content on tablets and smartphones.

    “This agreement comes at an important moment, in the midst of a debate how best the newspaper industry should adapt to the new digital age,” says Geerts. “As the Economist recently reported under the enticing headline, Letting the Baby Dance, many governments including Ireland, the Netherlands, Australia, UK and Canada are considering or have gone ahead with Internet-friendly copyright reforms. At the same time, some European countries including Germany and France are considering an extension of copyright protection to excerpts of newspaper articles appearing in search engines’ results. The European Journalism Centre recently outlined why both Google and newspapers would be best off cooperating and The Reach Group published independent research reaching a similar conclusion.”

    “We agree,” he adds. “Many win-win ways exist for Google and publishers to join forces in the new digital universe. We drive traffic to publishers – four billion clicks a month around the globe, offering publishers 100,000 business opportunities per minute. Our AdSense program pays out $7 billion a year to web publishers worldwide. Publishers remain free, with the addition of just a few lines of code, to pull out of Google web search and Google News. Publishers also remain free to determine whether to put their articles discovered through Google search behind a paywall.”

    Google has indicated it would like to come to similar terms with publishers around the world.

  • Google News Gets Some Tablet-Friendly Tweaks

    Google announced some improvements to Google News for tablets today.

    Users will start being able to swipe horizontally between sections, and tap “Explore in depth” to see multiple articles and other info related to a story. There is also more room between articles.

    “There’s something special about reading news on your tablet,” says Google News senior product manager Mayuresh Saoji. “Indeed, swiping through articles brings to mind the familiar feeling of flipping through a favorite magazine or newspaper. Starting today, Google News feels even more natural and fluid on tablet devices.”

    “We think these improvements will help Google News send even more visits to news sites (six billion per month and counting),” adds Saoji.

    Google is rolling out the new features in the U.S. over the coming days on the iPad, Nexus 7 and Nexus 10.

  • Google Resists As German Lawmakers Talk Law That Would Require It To Pay Publishers

    You may recall talk of a proposed law in Germany that would require search engines like Google to pay to license content from publishers in order to display headlines (with links) and snippets of text.

    Lawmakers in Germany are reportedly debating such legislation today, and Google has put out a video and a petition, calling on German web users to resist.

    The Motley Fool is reporting:

    Google (Nasdaq: GOOG ) is facing what promises to be some hard-fought litigation in Germany, over a proposed copyright bill supported by the German newspaper industry that would mean Google would need to pay a portion of advertising revenue to any German newspaper whose articles turned up in search results next to those ads. They believe that it is their work that is attracting the traffic, so they deserve the advertising revenue, and Germany has some of the toughest data privacy laws in Europe. Google obviously sees the issue differently, and believes that this would be a slippery slope that would lead to paying anyone whose work turned up in search results, and would be to the detriment of every Internet user in Germany. The company enters its first round of debates in the German parliament this Thursday.

    This is just the latest in the ongoing battle between Google and publishers. Google has recently been dealing with a similar situation in France.

    Brazilian newspapers have actually banded together and pulled out of Google News, rather than waiting for any legislation to require Google to pay them.

  • Does Google Even Need Newspaper Publishers?

    In case you haven’t been following, Google has been battling traditional media publishers in a number of countries for years. Publishers want Google to pay to license their content so they can point to it in search results. In Brazil, 90% of the country’s newspaper circulation pulled out of Google News entirely. In France, Google faces a potential law which would require it to pay publishers to keep pointing to their content.

    We’ve discussed this situation numerous times, but Frédéric Filloux, GM for digital operations at Les Echos Groupe and based in Paris, has put out an interesting article looking at how traditional media fits into the Google equation, and the data he shares doesn’t make it seem like Google would miss these publishers too much.

    He looks at Google Trends data to look at the most searched terms in the U.S., France and Germany.

    “Except for large dominant American news topics (‘Hurricane Sandy’ or ‘presidential debate’), very few search results bring back contents coming from mainstream media,” he points out. “As Google rewards freshness of contents — as well as sharp SEO tactics — ‘web native’ media and specialized web sites perform much better than their elder ‘migrants’, that is web versions of traditional media.”

    He then brings up monetization, and how media contents contribute to Google’ bottom line. He looks at the most expensive keywords, which include things like: insurance, loans, mortgage, attorney, credit, lawyer, donate, degree, hosting, claim, conference call, trading, software, recovery, transfer, gas/electricity, classes, rehab, treatment and cord blood.

    “By construction, traditional media do not bring money to the classification above,” writes Filloux. “In addition, as an insider said to me this week, no one is putting ads against keywords such as ‘war in Syria’ or against the 3.2 billion results of a ‘Hurricane Sandy’ query. Indeed, in the curve of ad words value, news slides to the long tail.”

    He talks about all that Google has done and continues to do to deliver results to users for various types of search itself (as in not having to send users to other sites), such as shopping, flight search, etc., the Knowledge Graph, and concludes that as far as Google is concerned, having newspaper articles is just “small cool stuff”.

    In other words, Google can get by just fine relying more on “web native” media, if traditional media publications want to pull themselves out of the mix.

    This all comes at a time, mind you, when social media is playing an enormous role in breaking news (look simply to Twitter and Instagram’s roles in Hurricane Sandy news last week). Google has a whole other issue to worry about on that front.

    Losing any source, whether that be a newspaper or real-time access to tweets, does set Google back in its stated mission – to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible, but it’s looking less and less likely that Google will ever truly be able to accomplish that mission. Not only would this require cooperation from competitors, Google also faces potential regulation from various governments.

    As far as the traditional media, if Brazil is any indication, they may be in no worse shape without Google. The publishers that pulled out don’t seem to be missing the Google referrals too much, even if their traffic is a bit lower. On the other hand, that is a country where Google News has been deemed “irrelevant”.

  • Google vs. Publishers: Who’s Right?

    The story is old, but it is ongoing. It’s the same argument that’s been around for years, but it’s reaching a boiling point, and it’s doing so at a time when the flow of news is coming from more directions than it ever has before. Hurricane Sandy is just the latest in a long line of examples proving that point. Publishers want Google to pay them for the right to point to their content, and Google does not wish to do so.

    Should Google have to pay to link to content in Google News? Tell us what you think.

    The battle continues in Europe. This week, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt met with French President François Hollande, who according to a report from Bloomberg BusinessWeek (in an article that I did not find by using Google News), “demanded Google reach a deal with publishers”.

    Google responded to the French point of view even before Schmidt’s meeting. Here’s what the company said in a blog post a couple weeks ago:

    The web has led to an explosion of content creation, by both professional and citizen journalists. So it’s not a secret that we think a law like the one proposed in France and Germany would be very damaging to the internet. We have said so publicly for three years.

    Google’s point about the “explosion of content creation” is very valid. Google has been pretty consistent in that it will not pay publishers to link to their content in search results. The question is whether Google users will noticeably suffer if Google stops including content from certain publishers.

    This is currently being put to the test in Brazil, where 90% of the country’s newspaper circulation has pulled its content out of Google News. The publishers seem to be getting by fine without Google News (they haven’t pulled out of Google Web Search). The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas reported that these publishers have only seen a decrease in web traffic of 5%. Isabela Fraga and Natalia Mazotte report:

    “The (newspapers) themselves believed that the 5-percent loss was a price worth paying to defend our authors’ rights and our brands,” said Ricardo Pedreira, ANJ’s executive director in a phone interview with the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas.

    “The fact is, Google News is absolutely irrelevant in Brazil,” said Carlos Müller, ANJ’s communications advisor. “If you go into Google News now and search for (Brazil’s) President Dilma, you’re going to see that none of the websites of the main newspapers in the country are there.”

    “It’s important to point out,” he added, “that the portals of some news companies are still (in Google News).”

    That doesn’t mean, however that publications everywhere could get by as well without Google News. The Bloomberg article quotes Ricardo Pedreira, executive director of Brazil’s National Association of Newspapers, as saying, “Every country has a specific reality, and I think there will probably evolve different models in each nation.”

    Google is already facing turbulence in Germany and Italy, in addition to France, so we may very well see publications pulling out of Google News in these countries as Google refuses to pay. Google has made the point in the past, that without said publications, users would be able to find information from other sources.

    In September, Google revealed that Google News is currently available in 72 editions in 30 languages, and counts 50,000 publications among its news sources.

    “Linking to a diverse set of sources for any given story enabled readers to easily access different perspectives and genres of content,” Google said recounting the product’s history. “By featuring opposing viewpoints in the same display block, people were encouraged to hear arguments on both sides of an issue and gain a more balanced perspective.”

    If publishers pull out, they face having their viewpoint lost from users’ view. However, that certainly does not mean that they will not be able to reach audiences via different means, thanks in some part to that explosion of content Google refers to.

    Social media has rapidly emerged as a major source of news consumption in recent years. People don’t have to rely on Google News (or search in general) as much as they might have in the past. People have news driven to them via Facebook, Twitter, and numerous other channels all day, every day, right to the phones in their pockets.

    In a recent article, I made the case that Google is even risking pushing more news seekers to Twitter specifically thanks to its lack of real time search. Twitter is the place to go if you want to find up to the second updates about anything, like say, a hurricane.

    While Google has certainly offered some valuable resources related to Hurricane Sandy, it wasn’t Google that all of the journalism articles were talking about over the past week, with regards to how the news was coming out. There was a lot more talk about Twitter and Instagram (pictures from which were often surfaced via Twitter).

    Sure, Google News has continued to serve its general purpose, but the news, as it often does, was breaking on Twitter. Google’s right. There’s an explosion of content, and that’s not going to change. People will find ways to get their news with or without publications in Google News (many of these same publications will be easily found via social media).

    So who needs who more? Google or publishers? Google will want to make sure it has enough quality sources in its results, but it is unlikely that they will have to pay many publishers to do so, because thousands simply want to be discoverable in Google, and are happy to be there without demanding fees. Google does have an agreement with the AP for hosted content, and it’s possible that Google could look to plug any potential holes with similar arrangements, but it’s unlikely that Google will submit to such deals with a sizable number of publications. They simply don’t need all of that content that badly. Do they?

    Well, I would say no they don’t, to be a useful service. Readers can get by without a lot of the sources currently in Google News. But, on the other hand, losing a significant amount of publications would also be a continued failure at Google’s mission, which is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible. It seems that this mission is not worth paying publishers as far as Google is concerned.

    What would you do if Google News lost 90% of newspaper publications in your country? Would you miss them? How would you consume your news? How do you consume it now? Let us know in the comments.

  • The Latest On Google’s Battle With Publishers Who Want To Be Paid For Links

    A week ago, we wrote about the battles Google is facing with publishers, specifically in France and Brazil. In France, lawmakers have poposed a law which would require search engines like Google to pay publishers to license content just so they can link to it in Google News search results Google threatened to stop linking to publishers. In Brazil, the majority of newspaper publishers simply pulled out of Google News.

    A new report from Quartz says that Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt is traveling to Paris next week “to discuss the issue”. The publication spoke with France’s minister of technology Fleur Pellerin:

    “We don’t want to appear as a country that is anti-Google,” Pellerin told me in Boston today. “Obviously Google is a wonderful tool and Google is a major actor of the digital ecosystem.”

    “What I would suggest—and what I’m going to suggest to Google and to the press–is to start negotiating, to start discussions for maybe three months, and try to find an agreement on a negotiated basis,” Pellerin continued. “And if they don’t, well we’ll see.”

    Meanwhile, in Brazil, the publishers who have pulled out of Google News seem to be getting by just fine without it. The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, which originally reported on the issue, is now reporting that these publishers have only seen a decrease in web traffic of 5%. Isabela Fraga and Natalia Mazotte report:

    “The (newspapers) themselves believed that the 5-percent loss was a price worth paying to defend our authors’ rights and our brands,” said Ricardo Pedreira, ANJ’s executive director in a phone interview with the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas.

    “The fact is, Google News is absolutely irrelevant in Brazil,” said Carlos Müller, ANJ’s communications advisor. “If you go into Google News now and search for (Brazil’s) President Dilma, you’re going to see that none of the websites of the main newspapers in the country are there.”

    “It’s important to point out,” he added, “that the portals of some news companies are still (in Google News).”

    Irrelevant. Ouch.

    It will be interesting to see if this influences publishers in other parts of the world, and if so, how much that really hurts Google, which always has thousands more sources and an entire blogosphere at its disposal, not to mention YouTube and Google+.

  • Google News Gets Some Layout Adjustments

    Google News Gets Some Layout Adjustments

    Google is rolling out some new features to Google News search, including click-to-expand news results clusters, more multimedia and some updates to the layout.

    “Last year we updated Google News to make it easier for you to scan for stories that are interesting to you and let you dig deeper when you find them,” said product manager Rudy Galfi in a blog post Monday afternoon. “Today we’re announcing an update that brings some of those same ideas to news search.”

    “Each news results cluster is collapsed down to one result with the exception of the first cluster,” Galfi explains. “Click on the ‘Show more’ link to see articles from more sources. This improvement makes it much easier to scan through the search results to find just the collection of news coverage you’re looking for.”

    Google News layout changes

    Some expanded results clusters will be accompanied by a bar of videos and photos that are related to the content. In terms of layout, cluster images now appear on the left, and the source info has been moved to below the article links.

    In other Google News news, Google is facing a growing number of issues with publishers who aren’t happy with the way the site operates. Google is dealing with proposed laws in Europe that would require Google to pay to license content to link to it, while in Brazil, publishers have simply pulled out.

  • We’ve Now Had Google News For An Entire Decade

    Google announced over the weekend that it is celebrating the tenth anniversary of Google News’ launch. The product was unveiled on September 22, 2002, and has gone through quite a few changes in that time.

    According to Google, Google News is now available in 72 editions in 30 languages, and counts 50,000 publications among its news sources. Along with Google News search, Google says Google News connects a billion unique users a week to news content.

    “Inspired by the widespread interest in news after the September 11 attacks, we invested in technology to help people search and browse news relevant to them,” writes Krishna Bharat, Distinguished Scientist and Founder of Google News, in a blog post. “Google News broke new ground in news aggregation by gathering links in real time, grouping articles by story and ranking stories based on the editorial opinions of publishers worldwide. Linking to a diverse set of sources for any given story enabled readers to easily access different perspectives and genres of content. By featuring opposing viewpoints in the same display block, people were encouraged to hear arguments on both sides of an issue and gain a more balanced perspective.”

    “As we have scaled the service internationally, we have added new features (Local News, Personalization, Editors’ Picks, Spotlight, Authorship, Social Discussions), evolved our design, embraced mobile and run ancillary experiments (Fast Flip, Living Stories, Timeline),” says Bharat. “In parallel, we have monitored our quality and challenged our engineers to improve the technology under the hood—increase freshness, group news better, rank stories more accurately, personalize with more insight and streamline the infrastructure.”

    Last week, Google announced a new ranking signal for Google News in a news keyword meta tag, encouraging publishers to associate various keywords with their stories, in an effort to help Google better understand the content of an article without having to sacrifice the quality of the content itself in order to help Google. More on that here.

    In honor of Google News’ tenth anniversary, Google put together the following graphic, looking at the top news stories for each year of the past decade, as well as some noteworthy changes to Google News:

    Google News For The Past Decade

    Bharat wraps up Google’s announcement by saying, “Opportunities abound, and we are excited for where we can take this product in the next decade. While change is inevitable, one thing remains the same: our mission is to bring you the news you want, when you need it, from a diverse set of sources.”

    Might I recommend getting realtime search back?

  • Google News Gets A New Ranking Signal, And It’s A Keywords Meta Tag

    Google announced the news_keywords metatag for publishers in Google News to help Google better identify and understand content that is related to things that are in the news.

    Do you think this is a good direction for Google News? Let us know what you think.

    Here’s what it looks like:

    <meta name=”news_keywords” content=”World Cup, Brazil 2014, Spain vs Netherlands, soccer, football”>

    If you use it, use commas to separate phrases. You can add up to ten phrases per article, and each keyword is given equal value.

    The company says it’s a way to empower writers to express stories freely, while helping Google News propertly understand and classify content. In a blog post, Google News product manager Rudy Galfi explains the thought process behind the feature:

    The day after the historic 1929 stock market crash, Variety bannered their front page with these words: “WALL ST. LAYS AN EGG.” It’s a great headline: pithy, catchy, and expressive of the substance of the story as well as the scale of its consequences. It’s also worth noting that Variety’s editors had a full day to write the headline—millions of readers weren’t trying to search for the story within seconds of hearing about it.

    The Web has transformed both how news organizations report information and the way users find it. Imagine if “WALL ST. LAYS AN EGG” were used as a headline today by an online news site. Since the headline is a sequence of text that’s only readily understandable by a human, most machine algorithms would probably attach some sort of biological association to it. In turn, this would make it difficult for millions of curious users who are using Google.com or Google News to find the best article about the stock market crash they just heard about.

    With the news_keywords metatag, publishers can specify specific keywords that apply to news articles, basically like the classic keywords metatag.

    The whole thing is pretty interesting, considering that Google has downplayed the regular keywords metatag. In fact, earlier this year, in a Webmaster Help video, Matt Cutts said, “You shouldn’t spend time on the meta keywords tag. We don’t use it. I’m not aware of any major search engine that uses it these days.”

    Of course, this is a different tag, and it’s specifically news-related, though news results often appear in regular Google results. Cutts did say in a tweet:

    Google is careful to note that the tag will be only “one signal among many” that its algorithms use to determine ranking.

    “The news_keywords metatag is intended as a tool — but high-quality reporting and interesting news content remain the strongest ways to put your newsroom’s work in front of Google News users,” says Galfi.

    Keep in mind, Google still frowns upon keyword stuffing (unless that’s going away in an upcoming version of its Webmaster Guidelines, which is highly doubtful).

    In case you need a refresher, here’s Google’s quality guidelines for News:

    News content. Sites included in Google News should offer timely reporting on matters that are important or interesting to our audience. We generally do not include how-to articles, advice columns, job postings, or strictly informational content such as weather forecasts and stock data.

    We mean it — stick to the news! Google News is not a marketing service. We don’t want to send users to sites created primarily for promoting a product or organization.

    Unique articles. Original reporting and honest attribution are longstanding journalistic values. (If your site publishes aggregated content, you will need to separate it from your original work, or restrict our access to those aggregated articles via your robots.txt file.)

    Authority. Write what you know! The best news sites exhibit clear authority and expertise.

    Accountability. Users tell us they value news sites with author biographies and clearly accessible contact information, such as physical and email addresses, and phone numbers.

    User-friendly. Sites should load quickly and use URL redirects rarely. Clearly written articles with correct spelling and grammar also make for a much better user experience. Keep in mind that we can only include sites that follow the Webmaster Guidelines.

    Do you think this new keywords meta tag is a good signal for Google to be using? Share your thoughts in the comments.

  • Google US News Gets Larger Pics and a Social Perspective

    Over the next week Google is going to be making some changes to the way US news searches appear on their pages. The first change is going to be larger images on their main page. They are also adding a real-time coverage page that will feature all the latest articles paired with relevant Google+ post to bring a social perspective to the stories. Sounds kind of interesting.

    Here’s how they explain their decision to add the social aspect to their news pages:

    “Many news stories inspire vibrant discussions on Google+, and today we’re starting to add this content to both the News homepage, and the realtime coverage pages. This way you can see what your circles, journalists covering the story and notables like politicians or others who are the subjects of stories have to say about breaking news, and even contribute to the discussion directly from Google News.”

    I don’t think it will suit everyone, but it could go a long way towards bringing a comprehensive understanding of subject matter to the coverage. Multiple perspectives are always instrumental in bringing a truer understanding of what’s being reported. It’ll probably turn some folks off, but I believe it’s a positive move, especially if Google wants to continue down the social avenues of the internet.

    In any event, it doesn’t seem like a mandatory change. They say if you want the upgrades, some of the changes are already in effect. All you have to do is follow this link and sign up.We can expect the rest of the changes throughout next week, just as i’ve already mentioned above. I think it’s worth taking a look at.