Google has integrated Google+ into another one of their products: Google News. As of today, you can now see content from your Google+ circles in “Top Stories” as well as the all new realtime coverage section.
Here’s what they have to say iGoogle+News+Blog%29″>n a blog post:
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.
Now, comments from Google+ will play prominently on the page, as you can see in this screenshot from the new realtime coverage page:
Realtime news, by the way, is exactly what it sounds like. It’s an aggregation of stories as soon as they become available in Google News.
As of right now, you have to manually upgrade to get the new features. And of course, if you’re not signed in to your Google account you won’t see all of the Google+ content. If you want to stay logged in but you don’t want to see Google+ content, you can turn it off in the Google News settings.
You might not see all of this quite yet, as Google will be rolling it out to Google News U.S. readers over the next week. Google has been pushing Google+ into more of their products lately. Although it shouldn’t surprise anyone, considering their “Google+ is Google” mantra, some people are publicly pissed about the recent Google+/YouTube integration.
Should you have to pay to link? Sadly, it’s a question we keep having to ask, because organizations and lawmakers keep giving us reason to. If you’re a longtime reader, you probably already know my stance on this: the web is based on pages freely linking to each other, and when barriers are set up that impede that, it makes for a broken web.
In October, we ran an article with the very title: “Should You Have To Pay To Link?” Back then, it was about Central European News (CEN), a media organization that provides news, images, research, etc. to various media outlets, for money. CEN had sent payment invoices to The Huffington Post, simply because the site was linking to sources (such as The Daily Mail), which had paid for CEN’s content.
A couple years ago, there was the whole thing with News Corp. blocking search engine/news aggregator NewsNow.co.uk from using/linking to its content. NewsNow founder Struan Bartlett had this to say at the time:
A more recent example of some interesting linking policy would be this one from Lowe’s. They require sites that link to Lowes.com (I’m not sure what the legal grounds here are) to fill out a form and get permission first. This is done by fax. Yes, fax.
The latest incident comes in the form of proposed legislation from German lawmakers, who reportedly seek to enable content creators to charge aggregation services for using snippets, for as long as lone year. The Register points to an official document about the proposed law (in German).
It’s unclear whether we’re only talking about the actual snippets, or if that includes the titles. According to the Register’s report, aggregators may be forced to pay license fees, but if if the titles (which are essentially links), aren’t included, aggregators should be able to display titles/links without snippets, without having to pay. If such a law goes into effect, it would probably make more sense to do this, for most aggregation services, though user experience could be damaged.
Of course, there’s one news aggregation service that we know is all about user experience (at least at the PR level) – Google (and Google News). Would Google pay to provide snippets? If titles/links are included, that’s a whole different ballgame, and in fact is really where the bulk of this threat to the web comes in.
If we’re talking about titles, which are essentially links, we’re talking about having to pay to link to something. Even if this is only at a news aggregation service level, it’s a dangerous precedent to set, given that the web at large is based on linking. There are no clear lines when you’re talking about the subject of news aggregation – particularly in the age of user-generated content and social media. I mean, what if you create a Twitter list of accounts from news agencies, and share that with your friends, for example?
For that matter, the lines between what should actually be considered a news source are pretty gray too, when you’re talking about blogs, social media and citizen journalism. Laws like this would have to be governed by interpretation, and any interpretation – right or wrong – could have tremendous effects on the web, and really, society.
And let’s not forget, that while a law may be designed to govern the people and companies of a country, the web is worldwide. Linking knows no geographical boundaries.
When you’re talking about how an aggregator like Google News delivers results, how is it any different than how Google itself delivers results. It’s still about snippets and links. Such government control could not only jeopardize current news aggregation practices, but how search, as we know it, works.
Matthew Ingram, who writes for GigaOm these days writes a lot about this kind of stuff, and often makes great points about the state of journalism, and the whole citizen journalism/traditional media debate. As he presents it, aggregation and curation are synonyms, for all intents and purposes, and I agree. But curation can not only come from a system like Google News or a Techmeme. It can come from a news publication itself. It can come from a single person using any publishing format on the web. That means it could be a blog, a Google+ account, a Twitter account, a Twitter list, a Facebook account or whatever. Facebook even has a new interest lists feature.
The point is, it’s all about the following you have, as to how much that contributes to content being consumed by its audience.
So laws like this could jeopardize how we use social media too. But more than that – they could jeopardize how people use the web. It’s why the publishing world wants the paid app model (like The Daily) to succeed so well, but that model will never pan out to its full potential as long as that pesky web is around – a tap away via your phone or tablet’s browser. Perhaps news organizations should start lobbying for the death of the web browser. That would go over well.
Links are the web. The web is links. Links are what keeps the web alive, and are the reason we have not all been completely consumed into closed app ecosystems (though we certainly spend more of our time there than ever).
One thing that continues to baffle me, is that so many publishers and news organizations are still so opposed to how the web works. Links gain you more exposure. There are legitimate points on the other side of the argument, but the fact is that links give more people more opportunities to read your content, and if they’re not reading your content, they’re just going to read someone else’s – someone that has figured out a better way to monetize their content – perhaps someone that doen’t care about monetizing their content. Regardless, it’s not benefiting you.
Of course, all efforts to see “aggregators” paying to link aren’t being driven by governments. News organizations (The AP, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Gazzette, McClatchy, and numerous others) have banded together to form NewsRight, a collaboration designed to find ways of getting aggregators to pay. I haven’t heard a lot of success stories about that one yet.
Do you think news organizations should be charging “aggregators” for linking? Even snippets? Let us know what you think.
By the way, if you’re a content creator, curator or aggregator, and you feel your audience is or could be interested in this topic, please feel free to link to this article. As a bonus, we’ll even let you throw in a snippet.
If you are a frequent user of Google News, you probably know that when you search for highly talked-about, newsworthy people within the News framework, Google provides you with a relevant quote from the person at the top of your results.
This quote usually comes from a popular or recent article about the person that also appears in the Google News search results. The quote is automatically generated by a Google algorithm – not hand-picked. And as we know all too well, there are often flaws in algorithms.
This leads us to Ron Paul, and the unfortunate misquote that adorned his search results a couple weeks ago. Barry Schwartz pointed me to a Google News Help thread where one user had captured a result with a particularly racist misquote from the Presidential hopeful:
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The outraged user commented:
This was never spoken by Ron Paul, and should not be displaying Inaccurate and Misleading racist quote to Millions of Google users. Can anyone post a news article with “questionable content” and then have Google use it to deface an individual just because of one authors prejudice? Please remove this, it has been showing for days, I would hope Paul himself would take legal action against Google for something of this nature.
There’s a good point in there. This kind of thing could be seen by millions and millions of Google users, especially if it was plastered at the top of the results for multiple days. Of course, Google didn’t do this on purpose to smear Ron Paul, but there’s no denying that this kind of accidental misquote displayed so prominently could really do damage to a public figure – especially a politician running for the highest office in the land.
This quote is no longer displayed when one searches for Ron Paul within Google News –
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But it got me thinking. This Google News feature may have the problem of providing some serious confusion, misquoting, and out of context quoting on occasion. I mean right now, if you search Mitt Romney within Google News, you get this quote at the very top:
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To be fair, that’s not a misquote – Romney did say that. But that quote has been at the center of a huge controversy within the Republican party and a focal point of attacks against the former Governor for the past week. The whole controversy centers on the fact that Romney supporters feel that quote was taken out of context. It’s kind of ironic to see it presented at the top of a Google search without any context.
Other, smaller problems can occur as well. Take for instance the confusion created when you search for Joe Biden within Google News:
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That quote is cut off and therefore it is unclear who he is talking about. To a casual searcher who doesn’t quite grasp that section’s function, it might appear that it’s just saying that Joe Biden himself will “double down” on those policies.
Then again, sometimes the algorithm works splendidly:
Google News has added a new feedback link so that users can send feedback about the service, report problems, etc.
It appears at the bottom of the page, as pictured:
The Google Feedback gadget appears when you click the link. “The feedback gadget will also help you send us a screenshot if you want to draw our attention to a specific aspect of the site,” says Google News strategist Mariko Suzuki. “Use the tool to highlight an area relevant to your feedback and black out any personal information before submitting the screenshot to us.”
Suzuki notes that Google may not be able to reply to your comments individually, but that the feedback will help Google “create a better Google News experience”.
The feedback will launch globally, but it will be available first in the U.S.
Just a couple days after announcing their new Politics & Elections hub, Google is making another attempt to keep you apprised of all the breaking news surrounding the 2012 campaign.
Google News now features an Elections section on its homepage which, like all other Google News sections, will attempt to feature the most recent and important stories about the volatile political season.
In Google News’ standard homepage (non-personalized), the Elections section will appear just below the Health section, according to the Google News team.
The new Google News homepage section is just one of many ways Google is attempting to keep internet users in the know this year. The aforementioned Google Politics & Elections hub charts the hottest news surrounding the campaign, as well as search trends, mentions tracking, and specific subcategories for each candidate. The site is also a place to see recent election results, for instance Tuesday night’s Iowa Caucus results.
And remember, YouTube Politics still compiles all the best political videos, whether they be news, parodies, or user-submitted rants.
Apparently Google is pushing authorship markup so hard they are eliminating other ways for users to find content by author. They have eliminated the “author:” search operator in Google News, which allowed users to find article specific to one author. Now, it’s all about authorship markup, like Google has been pushing in its regular web search results. In a post in the Google Help Forums (via Search Engine Roundtable), a Googler, Erik S., commented:
The author: search operator is no longer available. For author-specific Google News content, I would recommend use of the Authorship capabilities in Google News, introduced last month. Integration with Google+ circles means easier following and engagement between authors and readers.
Authorship markup is actually not only a way for authors to gain visibility in search, but a way for Google to gain visibility for its Google Profiles, which are essentially the center of the Google+ user experience. Google’s version of the Facebook Wall, if you will.
These are sprinkled all throughout search results now, and that includes on Google News.
Earlier this year, Google’s Othar Hansson said in a video, “It’s obviously early days, so we hope to use this information and any information as a ranking signal at Google. In this case, we want to get information on credibility of authors from all kinds of sources, and eventually use it in ranking. We’re only experimenting with that now. Who knows where it will go?”
That was in early August.
If you’re not already implementing authorship markup, it might be a good time to start considering it. For more about it and how to use it, check out this set of articles.
Google announced the launch of a new social element to Google News, involving the spotlight section. On the Google News Blog, software engineer Erich Schmidt (yep, that’s what it says) writes:
Over the past few months, myriad sites across the web (including Google News) have adopted the +1 button to help start conversations. But there hasn’t been an easy way for signed-in users to see what news articles your friends are enjoying — until now.
Starting today, the Spotlight section will sometimes include articles that your Gmail contacts and people in your Google+ circles have publicly +1’d. You can see their profile pictures and click through to their Google+ profiles, just like on Social Search. And of course you can +1 the stories too, expressing your opinion and optionally sharing with your circles.
Here’s what it looks like:
It’s interesting just how big a role social media, and Google+ in particular is starting to play in Google search. That said, it’s a little surprising that it’s taken this long to see this kind of thing come to Google News. I’d expect greater integration in the future.
Google has been abundantly clear from the start that Google+ will be heavily integrated across its products. It’s that very fact that gives Google+ a legitimate shot at taking on Facebook for social identity.
Leveraging Google News for traffic and pageviews is a strategy that’s been around as the popularity of Google News began to increase. For instance, an article from SEOMoz discussed the approach, and it was written in 2006. Now, thanks to a simple HTML tag adjustment, you can point Google towards the content you think will standout on Google’s news reel.
Much like the “nofollow” tag, the “standout” tag belongs to the HTML rel category, and much like it suggests, it’s intended for the most pop-worthy content, although, there’s nothing to stop people from putting the rel=”standout” tag on all of their content. One would guess Google is prepared for standout tag spam, and the inclusion of the tag doesn’t guarantee first page status on Google News. According to the Google News blog, the tag exists as a suggestion:
If you put the tag in the HTML header of one of your articles, Google News may show [emphasis added] the article with a ‘Featured’ label on the Google News homepage and News Search results.
The blog entry also suggests using the standout tag — which looks like this: — while linking to content being referenced as well as on your own:
Standout Content tags work best when news publishers recognize not just their own quality content, but also the original journalistic contributions of others when your stories draw from the standout efforts of other publications. Linking out to other sites is well recognized as a best practice on the web, and we believe that citing others’ standout content is important for earning trust as you also promote your own standout work.
While that stanza contains a “we believe” in reference to trust-earning, it’s clear Google is relying on this trust when it comes to picking which content is actually standout worthy. If you run a content spam site, one that survived the Panda purge, and you’re making liberal use of the standout tag, it’s doubtful it will make much of a difference in how the content is perceived, especially as Google refines the weight it gives links containing the tag in question.
In what looks like an effort to proactively address standout tag spam, Google suggests news organization only use the tag once per day:
At this point, we ask news organizations to use the Standout tag to cite their own content at most seven times in each calendar week. If a site exceeds that limit, it may find that its tags are less recognized, or ignored altogether. A news organization may cite standout stories from other news sources any number of times each week.
In other words, don’t spam with the standout tag, otherwise, we’ll ignore you; but please, use it when you’re linking to quality content.
Pretty simple, right?
With that in mind, how long will it be before we see the first “Standout Tag Spam on Google News” article? Before the end of the coming week? Once again, for those who may have missed it, the syntax for the standout tag is as follows:
link rel=”standout” href=”http://www.example.com/scoop_article_2.html”
Thoughts on the standout tag? Let us know in the comments.
Google announced today that it will no longer be using a separate crawler for Google News, and will now start using Googlebot.
“Google News recently updated our infrastructure to crawl with Google’s primary user-agent,Googlebot. What does this mean? Very little to most publishers,” says Google News Product Specialist David Smydra. “Any news organizations that wish to opt out of Google News can continue to do so: Google News will still respect the robots.txt entry for Googlebot-News, our former user-agent, if it is more restrictive than the robots.txt entry for Googlebot.”
“Although you’ll now only see the Googlebot user-agent in your site’s logs, no need to worry: the appearance of Googlebot instead of Googlebot-News is independent of our inclusion policies,” says Smydra. “You can always check whether your site is included in Google News by searching with the “site:” operator. For instance, enter “site:yournewssite.com” in the search field for Google News, and if you see results then we are currently indexing your news site.”
As far as analytics, you’ll still be able to differentiate traffic from Google Search and traffic from Google News, Google says.
Sites using Google’s metered subscription model or the first click free model won’t have to make any changes, but sites that require registration, payment or login before reading the full article, Google News will only be able to crawl and index the title and snippet that’s shown on the page.
Google stresses that the change will not affect how it crawls your News sitemaps.
Today, Google announced this as a feature of Google News. “Based on the data from that experiment, we have been working with nearly two dozen publishers in recent months and have seen a positive response from readers and publishers alike: readers get the news they’re interested in from the sources they trust, and publishers receive higher traffic to their websites,” says Yogita Mehta, a software engineer with the Google News team.
The Editors’ Picks section appears in the right-hand column in Google News.
“An array of news organizations, including local, national and niche publishers, are now using Editors’ Picks to display their best, most engaging content,” says Mehta. “Because Google News relies on algorithms, Editors’ Picks will always be just that—picks provided by publishers themselves, and not by Google. You can browse a set of publisher feeds that span national, specific and local interests—like The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, ProPublica, the Guardian and The Root, among many others—via the side-to-side arrows next to each publisher’s logo. The feeds you see are chosen based on a variety of factors, including your news preferences. If you’re interested in using source preferences on Google News, Editors’ Picks helps you do that with the slider that appears just below the articles.”
News organizations can go to this help center for instructions on using this feature. Right now, it’s only available for the U.S. version of Google News. Publishers can set it up via RSS feeds, though they must meet Google’s guidelines discussed in the help center.
Google announced a new Google News feature, in what appears to be an attempt to make news reading more fun (whether it actually is fun or not remains to be seen). Readers can earn badges based on the kind of reading they’re doing.
If a user reads more, they will earn a higher level badge. The scale is: Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Ultimate. There are also badges for all kinds of different topics (like Harry Potter, Chicago White Sox, or US Elections). There are over 500 of them so far.
“This is just the first step—the bronze release, if you will—of Google News badges,” says Google News engineer Natasha Mohanty. “Once we see how badges are used and shared, we look forward to taking this feature to the next level.”
Clearly Google is getting more social, with the release of Google+. As Google ties more of its products into its new social network, it will be interesting to see how it integrates Google News into it.
In the video at the top about the the badges, Google says, “You can share them across your social network if you want to find shared interests with friends or spark conversations around certain topics.”
Did you catch that “spark” in there. Google+ has a content discovery feature called “Sparks,” also aimed at “sparking conversations.” Perhaps a tie in here is in the cards.
To use the badges, you have to be signed in, and have web history enabled. The help center has more.
Google News users may also be interested to know that Science and Tech are now separate sections.
“In the spirit of continually trying to improve Google News, we have heard loud and clear from the many of you who asked us to separate our Sci/Tech section into two distinct sections. We are happy to report that we have now done this for all English editions, with more languages coming soon. We also combined some personalization settings from the ‘News for you’ and News Settings menu into one handy sidebar at the top right corner of the home page, so you can easily tell us what you want to read on your Google News.”
Google launched some new features for Google News today. The most obvious change is that on the front page, after the top section, you will no longer immediately see story clusters, but rather a single article from a single source, until you click on the box the story sits in, which expands it to show more related stories.
Click-to-expand: Each story cluster is collapsed down to one headline with the exception of the top story. When something grabs you, click nearby anywhere but the title to expand the story box.
Labeled diversity: For stories you’ve expanded, you’ll see genre labels for some of the additional articles that explain why they were chosen and how they add value. For example, you might see something labeled as an “Opinion” piece or an indication that an article is “In Depth.”
Multimedia and more: Within each expanded story box, you’ll find a sliding bar of videos and photos, links to related sections and easier-to-use sharing options, so you can quickly digest the sights and sounds of a news story, dig into different types of publications and share what you find interesting with one click.
Personalized top stories: The Top Stories section is expanded to six or more stories from three to give you more topic diversity. The first three stories remain unpersonalized and the same as before. The rest may be personalized based on your interests. To personalize your Google News experience you can click on “Edit” under “News for you.” You can choose the “Standard Edition” if you don’t want personalization.
Less is more: The default view is now the popular “One Column” (formerly “Section”) view. We merged List View into Top Stories, as described above. You can still switch to “Two Column” view, which resembles classic Google News.
In addition to these changes, Barry Schwartz points out that there are some new options in Google News Settings, which allow users to filter blogs and press releases in their Google News experience. You can set it for normal, or select none, fewer, or more blogs and/or press releases.
As Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan noted, this may cause some concern among some publications that Google has labeled a blog. A couple years ago, Google started trying to differentiate between blogs and actual news sources in its Google News search results. Among those labeled blog were publications like WebProNews, Mashable, Search Engine Land, ReadWriteWeb, etc.
There were no real criteria given for what made one publication a blog, and one not, and like Sullivan says, it didn’t matter so much until they made it an option for these publications to be filtered out. This changes things. That said, Google has changed some of its labeling, as it is no longer labeling WebProNews, Mashable, Search Engine Land or ReadWriteWeb blogs.
It is still unclear how Google is making the distinction. Some of those carrying the “blog” label have the word “blog” in their URLs – such as blogs.domain.com/… or domain.com/blogs/.… This is true for some of the stories from publications like Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. Not all of the publications carrying the label use these formats though.
As we’ve said in numerous articles, it seems silly to differentiate between blogs and non-blogs when it comes to news. There are plenty of blog-style publications breaking news frequently. Their writers get press passes at events. They interview people. They review products. They cover news in real time (or close to it). There are plenty of mainstream media publications that cover news much later after the story broke on a blog. It goes both ways. Are the labels really necessary at all? If a publication has been accepted by Google News, isn’t that enough?
Like Sullivan says in his article, it’s as if blogs are being treated like second-class citizens now. At least, Google seems to have let more people into the club.
Google began aggregating local news in its Google News service in 2008. When it first began, users typed in a city name or zip code and viola! News from their specific area was now available from a huge variety of sources. Currently, local news is now displayed in a box on the right side of the Google news homepage.
Google knew from the beginning that they weren’t the first or only news aggregators around, so what they touted at setting them apart from other was their thoroughness.
We’re not simply looking at the byline or the source, but instead we analyze every word in every story to understand what location the news is about and where the source is located.
Today, on the official Google News blog, they are announcing the “news near you” feature on Google News mobile.
Here’s how it works:
When you visit news.google.com from your Android of iPhone mobile browser for the first time, you will see a pop-up notification that asks for persmission to share your current location. Privacy concerns be damned, if you want local news you’re going to have to let them pinpoint you.
Considering you say yes, “news near you” will then appear at the bottom of the homepage. It will also be accessible at the “jump to” tab on the top right. Users can reorganize the sections to put “news near you” at the top on the personalization page.
Google has an interesting post on the Google News blog today, talking about how far Google News has come since 9/11. It has indeed come quite a long way.
Actually Google News was “born in the aftermath” of the tragedy, as Google News Founder and Head Krishna Bharat points out. “At Google we realized that our ability to display links to the freshest and most relevant news was limited by a fundamental problem: fresh news lacked hyperlinks,” Bharat says. “Google’s ranking depended on links from other authors on the web. Fresh news, by definition, was too fresh to accumulate such links. A new importance signal was needed.”
“We have certainly come a long way in the last decade,” he says. “Indeed, Google News now has over 70 editions in over 30 languages, and sends over 1 billion clicks a month to news publishers worldwide. Additionally, 1 out of 6 web searches on Google includes a set of news results, which are computed with the help of Storyrank. This helps bring coverage of the most important news story matching the query to the top of the ranking.”
“In the last 10 years there has been a lot of learning, iteration, and innovation in our team. And most importantly, we have acquired a loyal audience of news enthusiasts, who appreciate diversity and the ability to access multiple points of view on a story.”
The diversity of multiple points of view is an important point, particularly considering the ongoing debate of news-for-pageviews, brought up again this week. MG Siegler of TechCrunch took to his personal blog to call Mashable “pathetic” for writing so many bin Laden stories he deemed to be purely for SEO. Read our take here. His larger point, of course was about not only Mashable, but the news industry as a whole, and perhaps even more so about the tech news industry, considering the title of the post was “On Bin Laden Killlng Tech Blogging.”
Bharat provides a download of a list of 150,000 links from the last five days, which may point to what Siegler is talking about, but Google paints the image in a much more positive light. Look at all of these different points of view. The beauty is that news consumers have the ability to choose which sources they want.
Google has done a lot in the past to make Google News more personalized. With the flow of information not slowing down in the slightest, personalized news consumption vehicles are becoming more important to readers.
People want the news that matters most to them, while at the same time not missing anything important. These days, this is no easy feat. Social media and blogs have entirely changed the face of news, and there’s simply way more information of interest to readers than there is time enough to read.
Google continues to try and tackle this problem, or at least ease it, with a new set of updates for the Google News user interface. They’re now showing logged-in users stories based on articles they’ve clicked on in the past (in the U.S. only so far).
These articles come in the “News for You” section, and pulls from stories based on your news-related web history. “For example, if you click on a lot of articles about baseball, we’ll make sure that you get a chance to see breaking baseball stories,” explains Google News sfotware engineer Lucian Cionca. “We found in testing that more users clicked on more stories when we added this automatic personalization, sending more traffic to publishers.”
Of course not everyone wants to be served news based on their web history. It can be turned off. Simply click the link that says “Standard U.S. Edition” at the bottom of Google News.
“This will not delete any of your News settings or Web History,” notes Cionca. “It will switch you to an unpersonalized version of Google News for the duration of your current session.”
You can always delete your web history or log out of your Google account too.
Google has also added “Recommended Sections” in the side colummn that suggests topics that you can add to your custom sections. This seems to just be encouaging users to use the custom sections feature more.
“There’s an old saying that all news is local,” said Google’s Kevin Stolt. “But all news is personal too—we connect with it in different ways depending on our interests, where we live, what we do and a lot of other factors.”
Google News is competing more and more with Facebook and Twitter these days, as the first place people go to find news. Twitter has essentially become a news reader (in Google Reader-like fashion) for a lot of people, and Facebook is placing more emphasis on news itself.
Google is going to have to continue to deliver on the personalization aspect to stay fresh to people who seek this kind of curation.
An antitrust probe that began way back in August of 2008 has at last concluded, and the outcome tends to favor Google. Italian authorities have decided not fine the company or subject it to any additional regulation.
Google’s problems began when an Italian organization representing newspaper and periodical publishers claimed its members were being more or less forced to share content on Google News. Publishers who didn’t share were being excluded from traditional Google search results, according to the group.
Italian police then searched Google Italy’s offices as part of an investigation, and we learned that the maximum penalty for the alleged offense was ten percent of the unit’s revenue.
All’s well now, though. Google will just have to play nice and be a bit more open. Catherine Hornby reported this morning, "Google has now ensured newspaper publishers will not have content excluded from the search engine and pledged to disclose revenue-sharing mechanisms . . ."
Google itself also added in an official statement, "While we comply with Italian and EU competition laws, we also understand that there is always room for improvement in our business."
This may count as an especially important win for Google considering that Italy is the country in which three execs were convicted of criminal defamation over a random bullying video uploaded to YouTube.
Google has added an interesting new feature to Google News. Now, when you do a search, near the top of the results, you will see a button to follow news for that query.
When you click the button, it will add that query to the topic list on the left-hand side of the screen, as well as create a custom section on the Google News homepage dedicated to that topic.
For example, if I search on Google News for "facebook", and click the button, Facebook is added to my topic list:
There is also now a Facebook section on my Google News homepage:
Google has allowed you to customize your news experience in similar ways for quite some time, but the button simply provides a call-to-action, and like just like a call-to-action in an advertisement, it will encourage clicks and further use of this kind of customization, and therefore enhance the Google News experience for users.
The result of this is keeping people interested in using Google News, and let’s face it – it’s not quite as critical of a go-to source for news these days, as many Facebook and Twitter users are using these services as news readers.
Google has done a lot over the last year to keep Google News interesting, and it will have to continue to do so to keep traffic from going elsewhere.
Bing has added Facebook integration to Bing Shopping in the form of shopping lists. Users can select items they are thinking about buying, add them to a list, and post that list to their Facebook Wall from Bing, and ask their friends what they should buy.
"We’ve taken this notion that you make decisions online using your social network," Bing says. "And we said how can we take that experience….and make it part of the core search experience that you can use to get stuff done faster."
On every product on Bing shopping, there is an "Add to List" button. When clicked, a shopping list module will appear on the bottom left of the screen with a button to share that list anytime.
Once you share it and go to your Facebook Wall, it’s treated like any other shared link on Facebook, and you can add additional messages, such as, "Would you go with the Jordans or the Reebok Pumps?" or "Which Xbox should I get?"
"Now you can enlist the help of your favorite gadget geek," says Bing. "Give your friends and family a nudge by publishing a wish-list to your Facebook Wall."
The Search-Meets-Social Trend
This is just one of the latest in a continuing trend of social media features added to search. In fact, Google is also currently experimenting with a new section in Google News for "most shared" that appears to show activity on social networks like Twitter (ht: Mashall Kirkpatrick).
The new Bing feature, however, is basically just sharing search results more than it is tapping into existing friend data that’s out there, which is more what another Facebook/Bing announcement was about.
It’s an interesting time for search-meets-social because there are so many possibilities for creating effective integrations. The two complement one another in many ways, and social can help users reach decisions about their search results. We talked about that at length here. It’s also why Facebook has great potential as a search engine.
Bing is smart to take advantage of Facebook data in different ways, and we’ll no doubt see more integrations as time goes on. Google can’t get the kind of access Bing has, and it refuses to go the Facebook Connect/social plug-in route that a substantial portion of the web (even Myspace) has embraced.
Bing and Facebook are two of the biggest competitors Google has, and the more they work together, the more Google has to worry about.
Google has released a couple of meta tags it wants news publications to use in order to indicate original and syndicated reporting to Google News. To be fair, the company says it is "experimenting" with the tags, but this seems like an experiment that is destined to fail.
Don’t get me wrong, the concept behind the tags is noble enough – get proper credit to those who deserve it. Nothing wrong with that. Unfortunately, no magical meta tags are likely to accomplish this at any consistent level.
First, off here’s what they are. There’s one for "syndication-source" which is designed to indicate the preferred URL for a syndicated article. In cases where there are two versions of an article, Google wants publishers to use the tag to point them to the right one they would like Google News to use. It looks like this:
"In both cases, it’s perfectly valid for a metatag to point to the current page URL," Google software engineer Eric Weigle and Publisher Technical specialist Abe Epton explain in a blog post. "It’s also fine for there to be multiple original-source metatags on one page, to indicate a variety of original reporting leading up to the current article. If you’re not sure of the exact URL to provide in either case, just use the domain of the site that should be credited."
"Although these metatags are already in use by our systems, you may not notice their impact right away," the duo adds. "We’ll need some time to observe their use ‘in the wild’ before we can make the best use of them. But we’re hopeful that this approach will help determine original authorship, and we encourage you to take advantage of them now."
The Potential for Abuse
The approach may help Google determine original authorship in some cases, and it just as easily may totally mislead them, and more importantly it may mislead readers.
Matt McGee at Search Engine Land makes two great points: "Meta tags are, in some circles, an invitation to spam. And there’s nothing to stop Joe’s Search Blog from scraping and re-publishing this article, while also using one or both of these tags to claim that his is the original version. Worse, there’s also nothing to stop a high-trust, authoritative site from using — or misusing, to be more accurate — these tags."
Is it possible that Google asking publishers to use these tags is simply pointing out the flaws in the Google News model? The whole thing comes down to reader trust, and it’s hard to trust an algorithm. People trust humans (certain ones anyway), which is why social is becoming such a big factor in search. It’s also why many news consumers are increasingly relying on curation from sources they trust, whether that comes in the form of a site like Techmeme (which typically seems to do a fairly good job at this [though not always perfect either] without any special meta tags), or simply following someone’s Twitter list (or creating their own, for that matter).
Eerily, I can’t help but be reminded of some words Bruce Clay shared with us in an interview at Pubcon last week. "I don’t believe we’re going to get into a situation where Google’s going to pass on an opportunity to control the flow of news," he said. "Whoever owns news on the web is pretty influential on the web. It is an excellent opportunity to direct people where you want them to go, to cause things to happen the way you want them to happen."
The fact of the matter is that if a publication is trustworthy enough to credit the original source in a meta tag, they’re going to be trustworthy enough to credit them in the article itself, in most cases with a link. It is highly doubtful that all of the trustworthy people out there covering stories will take the time to insert these extra steps into their routines just to make Google’s job easier, especially when social networks like Twitter and Facebook are playing an increasingly large part in how people are getting their online news. And the system is not even for Google as a whole. Just for the much narrower Google News.
Maybe I’ll be proven wrong, but I just don’t see this catching on to any large degree. What do you think? Let us know in the comments.
Stop by an average American house any evening, and the odds are good you’ll find the TV on. You’re much less likely to see someone curled up with a book. Google may be onto something, then, as it’s introduced a "Spotlight Video" section to Google News.
We’ll admit: assuming you can read faster than a person is likely to speak, videos aren’t the most efficient way of absorbing information. Also, since lots of computer users share offices with other individuals, the videos might get passed over due to the distracting noise they’ll generate.
Still, Google’s algorithms have been tuned to emphasize interesting clips. A post on the Google News Blog explained that spotlighted stories "aren’t your typical breaking news. Instead you’ll find stories of enduring appeal such as feature articles, investigative reporting and opinion pieces."
So if you decide to go looking for it, the Spotlight Video section is in the right-hand column of Google News and perhaps around one-fourth of the way down the page (depending on what sort of layout you’ve selected).
Then there’s one other, less significant change to Google News we might as well document: the post stated, "[Y]ou may have noticed we also modified the left-hand navigation. Now, as you scroll down the page, the navigation menu will move with you. This way, you can always see the sectional and hot topic quick links."
These updates are perhaps minor enough not to annoy anyone and yet substantial enough that some folks will happily take advantage of them.
Google is testing a feature that brings Twitter into Google News. It’s not just the addition of tweets into the news mix, but rather a way for users to personalize their experience using the people they follow on Twitter. It makes sense that Twitter is integrated with Google News, and I would not be surprised to see this emerge as a an actual feature, after testing.
The feature consists of a box, that asks you to connect to your Twitter account to see when people you follow are talking about the news. According to Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land, who provides the following screenshot, it only displays tweets from people who are sharing content that is actually indexed by Google News. This makes sense too.
"Twitter has come out several times now and said straight up – it is not a social network," says Mike Melanson at ReadWriteWeb . "Rather, it is a medium for discussing politics, entertainment and, more importantly, disseminating news."
Whether or not Twitter is a social network is debatable, but it is clearly more, and has always been considered a way to consume news, not to mention a way to break it. I’m sure we will see further integrations of Twitter and news as time goes on. Google of course already has realtime search, which consists largely of Twitter content (with other sources sprinkled in), which generally only displays in regular web searches for topics that are currently being actively discussed. These topics are usually based on some kind of news.
It will be interesting to see if Facebook data is worked into Google News in a similar fashion. Google doesn’t have access to the kind of data for Facebook that it does Twitter, but they are able to pull in public Facebook data. They’re already doing so for realtime search. Google wants more Facebook data, however, and they seem to think they’ll get what they covet one way or another. However, in this case, I would think some kind of Open Graph or Facebook Connect integration would suffice, for personalizing the Google News experience.
Of course, we don’t even know if the Twitter integration will become a real feature. As Google likes to say quite often, "At any given time we are running between 50-200 search experiments. You can learn more on our blog."
Google itself also added in an official statement, "While we comply with Italian and EU competition laws, we also understand that there is always room for improvement in our business."
