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Comments to date: 11. This is page 1 of 2. | |
Anonymous
| Posted at 3:52pm on Friday, November 20th, 2009 | Recently Google News has been heavily featuring Fox "News" stories without alternative coverage. These stories are political hit pieces by and large. While they are fine as opinion pieces Google is doing us a disservice in putting them in "news" slots.
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Mondo Times editors
Boulder Colorado USA | Posted at 2:18pm on Monday, November 16th, 2009 | Google To Scan "Orphan Books" First, Ask Questions Later, Business Week reported on November 14, 2009:
"So-called orphan works, millions of books for which copyright laws still apply but whose rights owner is unknown or cannot be located, will still be scanned and sold in an online registry.
In September, head of the US Copyright Office Marybeth Peters said Google’s initial “opt-out” proposal to scan orphan works before attempting to find rights owners amounted to a throwing out of “fundamental copyright principles.” Though the most recent revisions stipulate more rigorous steps for collecting and distributing money to authors and publishers, the proposed agreement is still opt-out, as Danny Sullivan pointed out in his blog Search Engine Land. Peters is still likely to object."
The full story:
http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2009/11/google_books_sc.html
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Mondo Times editors
Boulder Colorado USA | Posted at 3:42pm on Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 | Google Plunks Down $750 Million for Mobile Ad Company AdMob
Wired reported on November 9, 2009:
"While Google already has text ads that accompany mobile searches, AdMob specializes in graphic ads that show up on web pages and mobile applications. AdMob collects demographic data on mobile users, and charges a premium to let advertisers choose to target professionals, teens or early adopters.
Google pulled in $5.96 billion in revenue in the third quarter of 2009 and had $1.65 billion in profit. Search engine text ads accounted for 67 percent of that revenue, while 30 percent comes from ads on other publishers’ sites."
The full story:
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/11/google-buys-mobile-ad-company-for-750m/
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Mondo Times editors
Boulder, Colorado USA | Posted at 1:54pm on Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 | Responding to Rupert Murdoch's plan to remove News Corporation content from Google, Google spokesman Chris Gaither told the E-Commerce Times that publishers can do what they like:
"News organizations are in complete control over whether and how much of their content appears in search results. Publishers put their content on the Web because they want it to be found, so very few choose not to include their material in Google News and Web search," Gaither said. "But if they tell us not to include it, we don't. There are simple technical standards, used by millions of webmasters and honored by all reputable search engines, to instruct a search engine not to index a Web page or even a particular photo on a page. And if publishers want their content to be removed from Google News specifically, all they need to do is tell us."
The full story:
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/rsstory/68597.html
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Mondo Times editors
Boulder Colorado USA | Posted at 7:21am on Monday, November 9th, 2009 | Murdoch to block Google searches as a way to encourage people to pay for online content, the Guardian reports on November 9, 2009:
"In recent months, Murdoch his lieutenants have stepped up their war of words with Google, accusing it of 'kleptomania' and acting as a 'parasite' for including News Corp content in its Google News pages.
But asked why News Corp executives had not chosen to simply remove their websites entirely from Google's search indexes – a simple technical operation – Murdoch said, "I think we will, but that's when we start charging. You can get, usually, the first paragraph from any story - but if you're not a paying subscriber to WSJ.com all you get is a paragraph and a subscription form."
The full story:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/nov/09/murdoch-google
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Mondo Times editors
Boulder, Colorado USA | Posted at 5:59pm on Saturday, July 25th, 2009 | Josh Cohen, senior business product manager at Google, has released a statement about how news publishers can opt out of being indexed by Google. The message was posted on July 15, 2009 at the Google Public Policy Blog:
"Last week, a group of newspaper and magazine publishers signed a declaration stating that "Universal access to websites does not necessarily mean access at no cost," and that they "no longer wish to be forced to give away property without having granted permission."
We agree, and that's how things stand today. The truth is that news publishers, like all other content owners, are in complete control when it comes not only to what content they make available on the web, but also who can access it and at what price. This is the very backbone of the web -- there are many confidential company web sites, university databases, and private files of individuals that cannot be accessed through search engines. If they could, the web would be much less useful.
For more than a decade, search engines have routinely checked for permissions before fetching pages from a web site. Millions of webmasters around the world, including news publishers, use a technical standard known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) to tell search engines whether or not their sites, or even just a particular web page, can be crawled. Webmasters who do not wish their sites to be indexed can and do use the following two lines to deny permission:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
If a webmaster wants to stop us from indexing a specific page, he or she can do so by adding '' to the page. In short, if you don't want to show up in Google search results, it doesn't require more than one or two lines of code. And REP isn't specific to Google; all major search engines honor its commands. We're continuing to talk with the news industry -- and other web publishers -- to develop even more granular ways for them to instruct us on how to use their content. For example, publishers whose material goes into a paid archive after a set period of time can add a simple unavailable_after specification on a page, telling search engines to remove that page from their indexes after a certain date."
The full post:
http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2009/07/working-with-news-publishers.html
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Eric Kallgren
Boulder Colorado USA | Posted at 4:52pm on Thursday, May 21st, 2009 | Google has dropped the idea of buying a newspaper company, Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson and Chrystia Freeland reported in the Financial Times on May 20, 2009:
"Google has considered buying a newspaper or using its charitable arm to support news businesses seeking non-profit status, but is now unlikely to pursue either option, Eric Schmidt, chairman and chief executive, told the Financial Times.
His comments, in an interview with FT.com, will cool speculation that the deep-pocketed search engine operator might save franchises such as the New York Times that are struggling with debts and declining advertising revenue.
Google had looked at buying a newspaper but was “trying to avoid crossing the line” between technology and content, Mr Schmidt said. It was instead working with publishers to make their websites “work better” for online advertising."
The full story:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2252e92c-4569-11de-b6c8-00144feabdc0.html?nclick_check=1
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Eric Kallgren
Boulder, Colorado USA | Posted at 11:53pm on Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 | Google CEO Eric Schmidt talked about how web sites (in particular newspaper web sites) are ranked in Google and Google News when he participated in a brief question and answer session following his speech at the Newspaper Association of America convention on April 7, 2009:
Q: Is there a way to look at search and when you search on a particular topic, that news organizations with credible brands, that somehow the algorithm could be tweaked to reflect that, not only for the benefit of the publishers, but for the users?
Eric Schmidt: "We actually do that in the case of Google News. Google News uses a relatively fixed set of sources which are selected based on exactly the kind of trust that you're describing. So the answer to your question is yes on Google News.
For general search, we've been careful not to bias it using our own judgment of trust because we're never sure if we get it right. So we use complicated ranking signals, as they're called, to determine rank and relevance. And we change them periodically, which drives everybody crazy, as or algorithms get better. There's no question in my experience that the top brands represented in this room would, in fact, float to the top in our search ranking. The usual problem is you've got somebody who really is very trustworthy but they're not as well-known and they compete against people who are better known, and they don't, in their view, get high enough ranking. We have not come up with a way to algorithmically handle that in a coherent way. But we're very sensitive to not do that on search we don't want to do the kind of thing you're describing unless we can do it across the board and for all categories of trusted institutions, not just newspapers."
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Eric Kallgren
Boulder, Colorado USA | Posted at 2:14pm on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 | February 25, 2009: As of today, Google is now showing ads at Google News. The Google AdWords program displays text ads alongside news searches in much the same way it does regular Google searches.
Google announced the change in a post to its official blog:
"In recent months we’ve been experimenting with a variety of different formats, like overlay ads on embedded videos from partners like the AP. We’ve always said that we’d unveil these changes when we could offer a good experience for our users, publishers and advertisers alike, and we’ll continue to look at ways to deliver ads that are relevant for users and good for publishers, too."
It remains to be seen how the newspaper industry will react to this change. In the past a number of news organizations have sued Google claiming violation of copyright (Agence France Press in 2005, and the World Association of Newspapers in 2006).
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Eric Kallgren
Boulder, Colorado USA | Posted at 3:02pm on Wednesday, January 21st, 2009 | On January 20, 2009, Editor & Publisher magazine reported that Google is ending its print ad program for newspapers:
"Google Inc. said Tuesday it will stop offering the Print Ads program that solicited advertisements for more than 800 newspapers.
"While we hoped that Print Ads would create a new revenue stream for newspapers and produce more relevant advertising for consumers, the product has not created the impact that we -- or our partners -- wanted," Spencer Spinnell, the director of Google Print Ads wrote in a company blog posting.
"As a result, we will stop offering Print Ads on February 28," Spinnell wrote. "For advertisers who have campaigns already booked, we will place their ads through March 31."
Through Print Ads, advertisers using search criteria could make an offer for an ad, and get a response or counter-offer from the newspaper. Most of the revenue generated is kept by the newspaper.
Google launched Print Ads in November 2006 with 50 newspapers. The network had expanded to more than 800 U.S. papers, Spinnell said.
Google wants to continue to partner with newspapers, Spinnell said."
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