Sarah Wachter
June 1, 2012
6:49 am
Media companies of the future must operate using a different business model that addresses the endless waves of disruptive new technology and staggering competition, said Krishna Bharat, creator of Google News and now Principal Scientist at Google, heading up … Read more
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Julie Moos
May 17, 2012
10:27 am
Search Engine Land | The Huffington Post |
Techmeme
Google's new "
Knowledge Graph," introduced Wednesday, could have some unintended consequences for journalists and news organizations.
I searched about two dozen news organizations, journalists' names and program titles to see what information would appear in these new "
knowledge panels" that display alongside search results.
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- The Knowledge Graph information for "60 Minutes" displays two correspondents who died recently and none of the newer correspondents who are helping to attract younger viewers to the program.
- Generally, the knowledge panels displayed people more frequently than publications, which could reinforce the value of individual journalists' brands over institutional ones. Nicholas Kristof has an extensive entry, while his employer The New York Times (like similar publications) has minimal results drawn from its Google+ presence.
- Knowledge panels are self-contained. You can keep reading and clicking inside them and forget the links to the search results that will take you to more information about your original search term. Users may appreciate this and Google will enjoy more time on its site, but news organizations may see less traffic as questions are increasingly answered inside search rather than via search.
- Portions of the knowledge panels rely on Wikipedia, which can be confusing or inaccurate (Michael Huffington is still listed as Arianna Huffington's spouse). The excerpts are also by definition incomplete, which can create a false sense of neutrality. For example, results for Rush Limbaugh and Rachel Maddow (see below) describe them with the same broad term, "political commentator," entirely missing the dramatic differences in their political positions.
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Steve Myers
May 15, 2012
4:12 pm
Scott Kidder, director of editorial operations at Gawker Media,
said it was "desperate" that Adweek's website tried to get him to share a story on Facebook, Twitter or Google+ before he had read it.
Turns out, that was a bug; Kidder was supposed to have gone straight to the story, bypassing the Google Consumer Survey
that Adweek uses as a sort of information paywall.
Why? Because Scott Kidder hates market research and is on a one-man crusade to drive them out of existence — and with them, the entire free market system — by lying on surveys. (Sorry, I just channeled Hamilton Nolan; I'll pull back a bit.)
The real reason is that Google Consumer Surveys flagged Kidder as an unreliable respondent and decided not to show him the survey questions.
Paul McDonald, senior product manager and the founder of Google Consumer Surveys, explained to me via phone and email what happened.
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Steve Myers
May 10, 2012
5:39 pm
Mashable
Lauren Indvik reports that people at The Atlantic's websites have
stopped thinking about SEO so they can focus on getting stories to take off on social networks. "Sixteen months ago we received the same number of monthly referrals from search as social. Now 40% of traffic comes from social media,” Scott Havens, senior vice president of finance and digital operations at The Atlantic Media Company, tells her.
Now that Google displays relevant results shared by users' friends, social is becoming more important even among people who are searching. "Social media is becoming an engine that drives more than just Facebook and Twitter’s own referrals," wrote Poynter's Jeff Sonderman, declaring, "Say goodbye to SEO."
Here's more on what Havens told Indvik at last weekend's Mashable Connect conference:
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Andrew Beaujon
May 10, 2012
12:55 pm
Volokh.com |
paidContent |
All Things Digital
Newspapers make judgments about where to place stories. So do search engines, Eugene Volokh argues in a new paper commissioned by Google, and their editorial judgment should be considered protected speech. Search engines are "speakers," Volokh writes:
The government may not tell the Huffington Post or the Drudge Report how to rank the news stories or opinion articles to which they link. Likewise, it may not do so for other speakers, such as search engines.
PaidContent's Jeff John Roberts says this position means Google, which commissioned the report, could
assert that squashing search results from competitors is protected speech:
In practice, this would mean Google has the right to punt sites like Yelp, which has complained that Google is a monopolist, to the search equivalent of Siberia if it decided that was best for users (Yelp now comes up second in a search for “restaurant review”).
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Steve Myers
May 2, 2012
4:38 pm
Adtrak
A sizable percentage of inbound search terms are hidden from publishers now that Google encrypts searches by default when users are logged in to Google.com and Firefox and Chrome use encrypted search in their toolbars.
When Google announced the change in October,
the company predicted that the change would affect less than 10 percent of searchers. Adtrak writes that the figure is much higher:
Figures reiterated quite often on blogs, forums and in tweets suggest that some 20% of their keyword traffic is hidden behind secure search (when a person is signed into their Google account and searching the web).
I checked Poynter.org's analytics: Keywords were hidden in 29 percent of searches in April. That's up from 22.5 percent in November, shortly after the change was made. Now "(not provided)" makes up the largest category of search terms, dwarfing the second place term: Poynter. Overall, 6 percent of inbound traffic now comes from a black box.
Besides Google,
Firefox and Chrome now default to secure search in their toolbars. When you combine Google's share of the search market with Firefox and Chrome's share of the browser market, about 26 percent of searches will be encrypted, not including those logged in to Google, according to Practical eCommerce.
Adtrak's take:
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Andrew Beaujon
Mar. 29, 2012
4:28 pm
Adweek |
paidContent
Speaking at the Guardian's Open Weekend event, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger
asked readers what they'd be willing to give in exchange for the paper's journalism: money, time or data.
Rusbridger, do I ever have an economic model to throw out at your next chat. Google Customer Surveys are these odd wee questions that interrupt articles at sites that employ them. You tell the box what you like about movie theaters, for example, and then you can read about someone accused of making bomb threats to local schools.
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Jeff Sonderman
Mar. 28, 2012
10:10 am
The Next Web |
Disqus
Google is developing a new article commenting system tied to its Google+ social network, an unnamed source
tells The Next Web.
The Google comment system, which will almost certainly rival that of Facebook, will have deep links to Google’s network of services and websites, indexing comments in Google Search, and most significantly, the system will be available for use on third party sites.
Meanwhile, Disqus is beta-testing the next version of its popular commenting plugin, codenamed
Disqus 2012. The biggest addition to the new version is a "community" tab that shows the most active discussions and the most frequent commenters across the site.
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Steve Myers
Mar. 8, 2012
5:48 am
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