Google News' local feature: Promoting or hurting newspapers?
By Leah McBride Mensching, Friday 8 February 2008 at 23:35 :: World Digital Media Trends :: #1235 :: rss
Earlier this week, Google News unveiled a new feature that creates a local section for any city, state or country in the world and includes thousands of news sources for that local section. What makes the feature different is that every word in each story – not just the source or byline – is analysed to understand the location the news focuses on, and where the news source is located, Google software engineers Andre Rohe and Rohit Ananthakrishna wrote in their blog Wednesday.
So does this new way of analysing data to come up with the most relevant top news for an area actually work? I checked on my own city, Chicago, to see how relevant the Internet giant's news results are.
Unfortunately, what Rohe and Ananthakrishna didn't explain was how to find the local feature.
First, I went to Google News and typed "Chicago." Google came up with 149,770 results for Chicago news. The top five stories listed for Chicago offered hardly any local coverage. The Chicago Tribune came up as a top source only twice out of 20 times for those top five stories. The Chicago Sun-Times and other Chicago publications were nowhere to be seen, at least in top news results for these five stories. Therefore, this couldn't be the local news feature Rohe and Ananthakrishna were talking about.
Finally, I found the feature by clicking on "Advanced news search," and then by typing in "Chicago" under "Location." This time, 46,087 results came up, with news sources in Chicago predominantly filling the page, and matching many of the top local stories on the Tribune and Sun-Times sites, as well as other local news sites.
“The top stories for a given area will be at the top of your results. Our article rankings will also take into account a publication's location so we can promote all the local sources for each story,” Rohe and Ananthakrishna wrote in their blog posting.
At the bottom of the first page of results, I was able to click on "Add a local section for Chicago, IL, USA to Google News" to add a local news section to my Google News page.
While Google does appear to be promoting local news sources, it is still unclear whether it will end up helping or hurting newspapers in the long run. Will users who currently go straight to a newspaper's Web site for local news, and turn to Google News for national and international coverage, instead turn only to Google, using it as a portal to the stories Google posts? Or, will it pull in readers who wouldn't ordinarily even visit a newspaper's Web site?
Is Google ultimately inserting itself between the reader and the newspaper, as it is also seemingly trying to do with advertisers and newspapers' ad departments? In the past, newspapers flourished on their own. But in the future, is Google angling to become the hand that feeds them?
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