Last year I
noted how
Newsknife's "Google News Watch" monitored how
Google News' story selection rated compared to that of human editors. Newsknife's methodology caused some debate, however. Now, reports the company's
Neil Pharazyn, Google News is being monitored on how it
sorts news-item sources by relevance. Each news item on Google News links to numerous versions of the same story as carried and/or written by different news websites. Those listings are sorted by relevance.
Pharazyn says that Google News has now evolved to become "a good barometer of how well a news site is serving the public." If a news site does well in Google News' rankings, then it's probably doing a good job outside of appearing on Google News. Newsknife recommends using
search-engine-optimization techniques to improve the relevance not only of your news site overall, but for news stories carried online.
