• croatiantimes.com
• romaniantimes.at
• salzburgtimes.at
• viennatimes.at
• austrianindependent.com

Today

• Vienna - VESCC English Catholic Mass
• Vienna - Unknown Underground
• Vienna - Cats
• Vienna - Andy Warhol
• Vienna - Laser Tag

© europics.at

24. 01. 12. - 11:00

• more Blog news
• RSS Feed Blog

24. 01. 12. - 11:00

Media Insider: Google News

Anybody who wants to find a news article on the web has the opportunity to go to Google news to find it.

In order to be listed in the Google news directory you need to be a registered news source, which means you need to be employing professional writers and generating a certain amount of original copy on a regular basis.

Google has thousands of registered news sources and its powerful search engines are constantly crawling the sites looking for news.

It's big business. There is no doubt that for an online news source like this one a Google listing on the news page means a lot of traffic. Traffic means clicks and exposure and that means money. But exactly how Google chooses which items to list is a closely guarded secret. It uses what is an extremely complicated Algorithm, an equation that decides automatically what news to list based supposedly on who broke the news first, how popular the site is in terms of traffic and links and probably a whole host of other factors that I'm not qualified to talk about.

And even if I was, it would be irrelevant because the way the algorithm works is as already said a closely guarded secret.

What I can tell you is that it doesn't work. At least not under the terms that anyone who is a professional in the news business would understand. And nobody at Google seems prepared to comment on why.

In 1993 the news agency that is the parent company for this news website was founded and every day generates news reports that are distributed worldwide.

To put that into perspective, on a typical day we usually have about 50 written news items, not to mention video and pictures. As with other news agencies this material is available to the newsdesks on papers all over the world who decide whether to publish it - and pay for the right to do so. But our material is also published in house online over a network of eight online newspapers, and has been for five years.

And that is why we know that Google news doesn't work - at least according to the journalistic standards that any newspaper editor would apply.

Every day even before the advent of the Internet a newsdesk whether it was a local paper or international publication would receive a massive amount of potential stories from everything from newswires to PR agencies.

In order to be noticed, as any freelancer or agency knows, you need to file before anybody else – you also need to be correct and get the facts right - and it needs to be well written. In short - you need to do a better job than any of your rivals. If you could fulfil all three criteria then you would be home and dry. Anything sent would sail into the news agenda and you would be paid.

That doesn't happen with Google news. If we look at this news site for example, which our agency publishes, over November when we started researching this report we did not find a single Austrian Times story on Google news. Many of the stories were published here first, and were all exclusive stories written by professional reporters who are on the ground. On this site some of those stories have attracted only a few dozen readers.

We spent a year trying to find out why the Austrian Times no longer appeared even though it was still present as a news source, we hired consultants to look at the technical specifications of the site and resubmitted the site plan to Google in the hope that this might solve the problem.Yet it was only when we raised the question of writing this article that the bottleneck vanished.

They only appeared on Google news when they turned up online hours later in a larger site that had republished the story. Some of the papers that republished had taken the material through a formal syndication arrangement, but others had simply taken it and republished it as their own.

We contacted Google news in November asking for a comment. We had more than a dozen examples of stories that had not appeared at all when first published here – but only appeared when republished. Unfortunately all those examples which were intended to be used in this article are now no longer relevant as it has taken Google two months of promising to reply but failing to do so. Now none of them are present any more on the Google news page as only recently posted items are eligible to be shown on Google news.

This is the letter that was passed on to the person who Google suggested as their press contact.

---------------------

FAO: Manuela Kager
Designated Press Spokesperson for Google Austria.

Hi Manuela,

Our news agency Central European News Ltd has several offices around the world feeding news to the main international media around the world from our base in Vienna.

Just of late we have been specifically working on the question of copyright and on how journalists can survive in a world where so much information is available on the Internet.

My first question concerns Google news based on the experience of my company that I believe many of my colleagues could benefit from.

* As a news agency we produce on a daily basis news items which are distributed around the world to our clients. Five years ago we started publishing these items on our own newspaper which is a Google registered news site. I do realise that your algorithm is something that is a closely guarded secret but over the past few weeks we have published a number of stories first and exclusively that were then followed up by hundreds of other webpages. Never once was the Austrian Times which carried the report first listed on Google news - but other sites which carried the report virtually word for word were listed.

Q1/ Over the course of monitoring the Google news service in Austria and the UK for the past few weeks I have not seen a single item from the Austrian Times appear there (www.austriantimes.at). Is there any reason why the Austrian Times might be blacklisted and therefore our original exclusive articles which we are publishing first on the World Wide Web are not appearing in your search engine? When we first launched the project when you carried out a search string on the word Austria in English you would find about 50 percent of the items on the front page on Google news linked to the Austrian Times. Now there are none ever. If the Austrian Times has been blacklisted what was the procedure that was carried out and did you make any attempts to contact the newspaper to warn them that they had acted in a way that had caused them to be put on the blacklist. Was the process of blacklisting the newspaper if it happened internal with no consultation or did you attempt to contact the publication.

Q2/ If the reason that the material from the Austrian Times is not appearing on Google news is a technical reason, please could you specify what this might be. Why did the company appear as the main Austrian source when it was first launched and now never appear. In terms of readers we have about 6,000 readers a day I believe and according to Alexa over 1,000 sites linking in. Do you offer any feedback at all to registered news sources that are not making their material easily available to you. If for example your argument is that the austriantimes doesn't meet certain technical standards – do you make any attempt to point out that the site is currently disadvantaged.

Q3/ Are you able to tell me what value Google gives in its algorithm to individuals who are the first to publish material? It seems that many of the items I have looked at link back to an earlier published version or a wire agency report and offer no extra or new information. Why don't you seem to use the original report?

Q4/ One UK national newspaper sent out a letter saying that they no longer saw any value in exclusive content – is that the Google news policy and if not why are so few original news items accepted on your page?

Q5/ Is Google considering any incentives for officially registered and accredited news suppliers to encourage them to contribute to the global Internet community by publishing their material independently and not through a third-party publisher.

I hope that you can realise why the answers to these questions are of interest to myself and other journalistic colleagues who are looking to move away from the classic business model for reporters of selling their material either as a staff journalist or a freelancer. It seems to me that Google news at least gives little or no incentive to anybody with an original story to publish. Routinely stories that we have had online even up to 24 hours before they are picked up elsewhere sometimes get only double figures in the terms of viewers. Double figures in terms of traffic is not going to cover the cost of doing the original article. In the days when you included all the articles that you found on Google news and didn't eliminate anything I would sometimes publish an exclusive story and then after the first few hours find that we had already been republished thousands of times.

I don't have any personal axe to grind with Google even though obviously the story I am writing is based on our companies experience but I do feel that there is too much on the Internet of everybody feeding off everybody else. Currently though there is little incentive for professional reporters to do anything to change this and they are a fast diminishing breed given the constant cuts in editorial budgets.

------------------------------------------------------------------

Manuela Kager made it clear that she was simply providing a bridge between us as a reporting team with a set of questions and the relevant person within the Google organisation. The number of people authorised to answer the questions was limited, she said, and the questions were passed constantly up the scale which was the reason for the delay. By the time of publishing this however now two months later there has still been no reply.

What has happened is that after months of not appearing at all on Google news, the Austrian Times is back again and indeed did appear again in the listings a short while after the questions were filed. That in turn has seen a significant increase in readership statistics but it doesn't answer the question of why it disappeared in the first place.

When we contacted online managers of some of the major international news portals there was an understandable reluctance to give an on the record comment. Nobody wants to upset Google news, but one manager controlling several websites with millions of hits admitted that the problems outlined in the e-mail to Google about sites dropping out of Google news are well known, even though nobody wants to rock the boat.

Rob Andrews, MD at Search Kingdom that specialises in search engine optimisation, said: "No one has the Google algorithms in their pocket. We all keep our ear to the ground, share information and do our own tests to find out as much as possible. But having said that Google's news search will probably be based on its natural search, but with a time factor thrown in.

Asked why some sites might seem to be disadvantaged, he said: "Google will take all the news sources its spiders have to crawl, and decide what resources to allocate to that source. That would be based on page ranking, original content and other factors. So if a site does not have enough repuation then content could be overlooked - until it appears elsewhere.

"I looked at the Austrian Times and its obviously a site that is historically rich with lots of brilliant content, but I can also see that from a technical point of view there is more that could be done to make it more accesible.

"Their algorithm, whether it be for normal organic search results or Google News, is absolutely fundamental to them and it is this and the ethos behind it that is the foundation of everything they have ever done in search. I am 100 per cent sure that the natural search is sound, for news they have the obvious addition of the time factor but I doubt it is that much different."

For David Rogers, editor at the Austrian Times, Google has not got it right. He said: "Today we had a story that has attracted 20,000 readers - but look for it on Google News and its not there - you only find it - word for word the same - on a rival paper that published after we did.  That's not news judgement that I can relate to.

"We once dominated the news search for Austria, then we vanished completely and now we are back in a limited form. Why?

"There are no doubt a lot of people that are only interested in trying to manipulate what search engines do in order to boost their statistics and therefore it's understandable that Google and probably others will want to keep the details of how they rate their news sources a secret.

"But our experience raises the possibility that that need for secrecy is leading to readers getting a diet of news that is both recycled and old - not what the internet was about - and that many of the genuine content providers that are originating the material are going to eventually fade away."

Austrian Times

Woman bites toddler
A woman who bit a two-year-old tot during a road rage row with her mother is being quizzed by police in Wiener Neustadt, Austria.

Cows zapped to death by lightning
Four cows were zapped to death after a lightning strike hit the barbed wire fence they were leaning on in Reith im Alpbachtal, Austria.

Wolf babies born in Schönbrunn
These cuddly Artic wolf cubs have got every right to look a bit frosty - after they emerged into the world for the first time in the middle of a 27 degree heatwave.

Cleaned Out
A Hungarian cleaning woman who stole tens of thousands of pounds worth of antique jewellery from an Austrian Countess and then sold it for "pocket money" unaware of its real value has been jailed by a court in Austria.

Great expectations for summer tourism season in Vorarlberg
The Vorarlberg tourism industry is currently riding high after a record breaking winter season, and the summer season is expected to follow that same trend.

Medics First Aid Lesson saves Boy
Austrian medics giving a first aid talk at a school managed to save an eight-year-old boy's life after he was shot in the head by his dad.

Salzburg Welcomes Home The Sound Of Music
Salzburg has finally been won over after a 45-year battle to ignore the musical that everywhere else in the world has an almost cult following.

Elsner saga back in court
A crooked fat-cat banker spotted partying after being released from jail because of heart problems is now back in the news after he was snapped sunning himself at a four-star wellness hotel and telling court officials he was too ill to continue with the trial.

Clem Chambers - Euro future in the balance
The future of the euro hangs in the balance and the G8 watched a football match. Incredible.

Shaina Sepulvado appeal for parole
Austrian Times reader Partick Capps has posted this appeal for pressure over the case of a girl sentenced to life without parole for a murder committed when she was 16.

Jobs in Austria