DailyTech - Go, Go Google News!

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Blog: Internet Go, Go Google News!
Kristopher Kubicki (Blog) - September 4, 2007 3:13 AM

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8 comment(s) - last by James Holden.. on Sep 6 at 9:32 PM

DailyTech capturing all placeholders on the Google News Sci/Tech section, minutes after this story was published (Source: Google)

Quickly, hug the nearest Google employee you can find!

You may have noticed DailyTech was a little light on content this weekend. You can blame the three-day weekend, the summer doldrums or even the back-to-school festivities. The real reason, of course, was that Google is dropping links to wire feeds from its Google News service.

And there was much celebrating in order.

Google News is unquestionably the largest DailyTech referrer. With more refer traffic than AnandTech, Slashdot and Digg combined, Google News is quickly becoming the dominating force in online media.

Many would claim that DailyTech is just a news aggregator. That's fine, in many respects we are, though I've always emphasized that our writers bring something new to the news sphere with every piece they write. That policy is right on the first page of the DailyTech Handbook. However, news aggregator or not, the content on DailyTech is still written in-house -- and that's an important distinction in the online news world.

Most news publications rely on the wire services for the bulk of their day-to-day content. These services, like The Associated Press and Reuters, allow newspapers to republish their content ver batim, and thus reduce the news room size and scope dramatically.

So what does all this have to do with DailyTech? Traditionally when a wire story hits papers, it gets aggregated by Google News hundreds of times. For example, even though tech sites like DailyTech released full details of Henri Richard's AMD departure hours (days?) before most of the majors, a very tiny Reuters wire cranked up several hundred instances on Google News in a matter of minutes -- pushing the in-depth coverage off the front page and out of the "Top 5" publication placeholder. Local papers, like the Chicago Sun-Times, were propelled to the top of Google's news rankings even though the only thing Cooke contributed to the news sphere was the republished wire.

Effective immediately, Google will republish four of the major wires directly on Google News and ignore new wires from local papers. Effective immediately, competition for Google News headlines became a much smaller pool, and DailyTech is already stretching out.

So for all those Google employees out there reading DailyTech ... Thanks! I owe you guys all a beer and Skittles!

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Ouch

By JackBeQuick on 9/4/2007 4:43:24 AM , Rating: 2

Sucks for the local papers that are paying for those wire feeds.

RE: Ouch

By Kougar on 9/4/2007 11:30:11 AM , Rating: 2

That is their own problem, why pay for a paper or their online subscription that republishes the same article that 20+ websites published already for free?

Very glad to hear Google is doing this, it was probably my largest annoyance with trying to use their news service.

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RE: Ouch

By JackBeQuick on 9/4/2007 12:26:58 PM , Rating: 2

I would not be surprised if this severely hurt the feeds in some way -- it will lower what they can charge.

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RE: Ouch

By Zurtex on 9/4/2007 7:02:49 PM , Rating: 2

Or they can drastically increase what they charge to companies like Google :P.

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RE: Ouch

By James Holden on 9/6/2007 9:32:23 PM , Rating: 2

I'd have to think the Google deal was huge with those guys -- which is probably why Reuters backed out.

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Secret

By Alpha4 on 9/4/2007 12:10:28 PM , Rating: 4

I guess Dailytech is no longer the best kept secret on the internet now. ;)

YAY

By Captain Orgazmo on 9/4/2007 7:59:10 PM , Rating: 4

Wow, google news may actually become slightly useful now. Unless of course you were interested in a story critical of China, or someone else google wouldn't want to offend...