Google News not much of a hit
Don Day June 23rd, 2008
Google News isn’t growing nearly as fast as the rest of Google - or competitors in its field. GN is currently the #8 most popular news site, despite that prime link on Google.com. The site’s growth rate over the past two years is only about 10% - while sites like MSNBC.com grew more than 42% over the same period. I use GN quite a bit - and am generally a big fan. But its home screen never gets my attention, I only use the search function to hit up major keywords each day. When the AP decided to resell our content to Google News, I became a public critic. The New York Times takes a dive into the interesting relationship Google News has with news sites - which want the traffic, but are afraid of the end result.
4 Comments Add your own
1. TR | June 24th, 2008 at 1:57 am
I think trying to compare Google News and MSNBC is total apples-and-oranges. I use it the same way you say you do - it’s a news search engine; the home page is an afterthought and honestly, unnecessary in my opinion … even detrimental, since the automated sorting sometimes yields bizarre results. Ultimately, though, I doubt it can grow quickly as an independent product because even though us newsie types go to Google News to find news coverage of certain people/places/things/events, I can tell from our logs that many more people go to just plain Google and try to use it the same way — real-time news search (which Google is trying to recognize by integrating news results in with everything else). Maybe the big G should come up with some new format of search page - multiple columns from web, news, blogs, video, images … instead of having news/blogs/video etc. search silos.
2. wtf? | June 24th, 2008 at 7:23 am
Good point TR. News is not searched for unless you already know what’s going on.
News is more of a ‘browsed’ product. While Google News is browse-able if you go to the G.News homepage, most people associate with Google through search.
Conversely CNN / MSNBC / etc… people go there to find out what’s going on.
3. discreet_chaos | June 24th, 2008 at 9:37 am
Perhaps I’m missing some underlying connection, but perchance did you mean to link the NYTimes article under my name rather than the one above?
4. Anonymous | June 27th, 2008 at 2:19 am
Don’t Google and Yahoo! get sued a lot over some news aspect? At least if you use Yahoo mail you have AP posts right there to browse in and out of your mail.
Leave a Comment
(Please keep URLs out of the comment body or the spam filter will block you.)Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed