Google News has been around for about three years now. That’s awful long for a beta test.
The problem is they are having trouble getting the product right. And they must do that before they even think of trying to monetize the traffic. (Right now, they’re doing nothing to monetize the traffic.)
Here’s the problem.
On the one hand, the news sources it links to want to be paid for the links. Many sit behind firewalls. Others move stories to paid archives very quickly, breaking links.
On the other hand, folks want to get into Google News. I know that my friends at ZDNet have jumped through all sorts of hoops to keep my Open Source blog there.
Which is interesting. Some of the items I post there are pretty-much hard news, often done with an interview. Others are think pieces, done with the idea of stirring comment.
How can a computer tell the difference? It can’t. So it monitors results with people, and makes value judgements.
Unfortunately, because of the way their sites are written and organized, many right-wing hate sites have gotten into Google News. During the 2004 campaign I noted many such propaganda sites getting their "stories" in there, so that if you looked up John Kerry or Howard Dean during the heat of their campaigns, you mostly got copies of their nonsense. I complained about this at Corante, but no one seemed to be listening.
Well, Google has had enough. They’re moving to purge the political sites. Naturally, the sites are screaming bloody murder, calling it censorship. They call their sites "e-zines," and insist they should get preference over much higher-trafficked "blogs" like Atrios.
Game the rules, and if they don’t play your way call them cheaters. Typical bullyboy tactics.
Here’s what is really going on.
I think that Google News
has a new "owner" within the company who wants Google News to offer,
well, news, while moving opinion to either the main site (where it
often bounces to the top) or to Google’s Blogsearch service.
I would hope this would be preparatory to Blogsearch getting more
visibility, say through a prominent link on the News page, maybe a
separate box marked Blogsearch.
By defining a difference between "news" and "blogs," then putting ads against the "blog" results while integrating the two services, Google could yet square this circle. There would be no ads around "news" results (so the media couldn’t complain about Google "stealing revenue") and it would be able to monetize everything (through the ads next to the blog results).
Politics, in other words, has nothing to do with it. Sometimes a business and technology story is just a business and technology story.
