DailyTech - To Those Who Play Google News

Submit News

Blog: Internet To Those Who Play Google News
Kristopher Kubicki (Blog) - December 3, 2007 11:32 AM

E-mail

del.icio.us

2 comment(s) - last by James Holden.. on Dec 3 at 12:51 PM

Google News is eliminating local papers from the global news sphere, and I'm not complaining

To news publishers out there: I hope you're watching Google News.

I don't like to pat myself on the back that much, but if there was ever cause for celebration over at Google it was when the company effectively dropped all local news in favor of hosting wire feeds directly. For those of you who missed the event in early September, here's how it played out.

Google, in conjunction with the Associated Press, Reuters and a few other wire services struck a deal to host wire content via Google News. Before this, local papers would race to post wire news as fast as possible in hopes of picking up the Google News placeholder. This is why you'd always see details about Afghanistan in the Chicago Sun-Times, for example.

With the local papers effectively out of the game, global (or at least non-local news) took a huge leap forward. Sites like DailyTech and Ars Technica jumped through the roof as far as placeholder markers and front page volume. DailyTech was the fastest growing site on Google News for September and October 2007.

My Google News tracker, Newsknife, shows how the AP and Reuters took the number one and number two spot away from The Guardian and IHT -- both of which rely on wire services for the majority of their news.

Of course, none of this means anything to anyone unless your livelihood depends on Google News traffic. For those of you patient enough to sit through my giddy ranting, I'll share a potential Google News replacement: Newser.

I just started using Newser a few weeks ago, but once you get past the Web 2.0 interface its clear someone has put a lot of thought here. Newser seems to only link to certain websites (DailyTech included, yay!) but where as the placeholder link on Google News is variable, it's completely static on Newser. So when a website writes about a topic, you'll always see the original source on Newser.

Comments

Threshold

Username
Password
remember me

This article is over a month old, voting and posting comments is disabled

Newser

By Murst on 12/3/2007 12:42:38 PM , Rating: 3

I checked out the site... it just seems way too busy. Why does every story need to have a picture associated with it?

Also, I run at a pretty average resolution I think - 1680x1050. In any case, I just don't see why I would have two vertical scrollbars on the site running at this res. I can understand one scrollbar, but having a scrollable iframe and/or scrollable div in addition to standard scroll bars in the browser kills the experience for me.

Of course, everyone has their own preferences. For news, I'm content with displaying RSS feeds on iGoogle.