Changes in Google News

Johannes Beus
In the last few month, Google made some changes to Google News that I want to touch upon a little. First, they increased the number of domains from which they will show the news by about 30% within the last 12 month.


The interesting thing here though, is that this did not lead to a noticeable decrease of exposure for the top-dogs. The next diagram shows how often the top-10-results are shown in all the Google News results.


We can see that, while swaying up and down, the exposure is always somewhere around 35% without there being a trend in either direction. It seems that domain-trust plays a major role in the newsindex, too and also that newcomers will usually have to play in the back (if at all).

The inclusion of blogs is a new feature. For the past few weeks, Google is adding blogs to the index and marking them with the “(Blog)” notation. I checked the database on my USB-stick to see which blogs were already included and at the moment, we can find 69 different blog-sources in Google News. There are the well known blogs like bildblog.de, googlewatchblog.de or netzwertig.com and then there are those blogs, that are likely only included because they are classified as blogs due to their software or thanks to them using a well known template (download the list).

Lastly, they have added the “Panorama” category a few days ago. In it, Google does not really show any new content but seems to put together subjects that were in different categories before. Seeing how this is fitting, I would like to remind everyone that you can use the Universal-Search-Evaluation functions of the SISTRIX Toolbox (which also includes Google News) free of charge until 10.21.2009.
Johannes Beus - on Wed (09/30/2009) at 09:28 AM

Add Comment

more
This posting is older than 30 days and therefore closed for new comments.