(UPDATE: Topix.net CEO Rich Skrenta has an interesting piece on the topic of this post)
The posts on memeorandum are all abuzz this morning on Google News finally being out of beta. While that is a good thing, what's more interesting is where Google News seems to be positioned vs. the news services from other portals going into 2006.
As Gary Price of Search Engine Watch explains the "out-of-beta" news:
"As of today, approximately 1219 days (29,256 hours) after the Google News that we know today launched in beta, Google has gone ahead and removed the beta moniker from all English language editions of the service. Editions of Google News in other languages remain in beta.
Currently, 22 regional editions of Google News in 10 languages are available...
The publicly announced total of English language news sources aggregated via News.google.com remains remains listed at 4500 on the Google News home page but as this "about page" points out that it's more than 4,500 English-language news sources.
Precisely how many more? Google isn't saying. Topix.net claims they crawl more than 12,000 mainstream sources and 15,000 blogs and also offer more than 360,000 topical pages. RocketNews offers content from more than 16,000 news sources and even more feeds. NewsNow aggregates content from about 22,000 mainstream news and blog sources."
I've liked Google News to date because it gives me unfiltered access to a large number of news sources locally and globally on a given topic. In addition, it allows some personalization.
In contrast, the other Internet media companies seem to have taken a somewhat different stance.
1. Yahoo News gives you all the news you want as long as it's mostly from AP in the default configuration. Yes, you can get news from other sources, but you have to click other tabs for it. And we all know that mainstream audiences are going to be far too lazy to do that (as Paul Kedrosky has reminded us before)
2. AOL seems to have outsourced it's news to Topix.net, which is not a bad move (see previous posts on Topix here and here). Because Topix.net takes the approach closest to Google News in terms of news sources. However, because of it's ownership and alliances with major newspaper companies like Gannett, Tribune, Knight-Ridder and the New York Times, the presentation of the news can sometimes be in question. As Search Engine Watch noted last February:
"The New York Times will have three of its story headlines featured at the top of 80 categories for an undisclosed price. All but a few of the topics are focused on New York City and New York state.
``This is significant because even if you are the biggest and best newspaper on the Web, you still want to increase your audience,'' said Topix CEO Rich Skrenta."
3. Microsoft's MSN seems to default currently to MSNBC for it's news, although that may change as the relationship between the two companies goes through the recently announced restructuring.
There are several other standalone, smaller news and blog news aggregrators that are also active in this "algorithmically sorted news" business, including companies like Findory, Rocketnews, and others. But they're not yet reaching mainstream sized audiences.
All this is not to suggest that Google News has a lock on the "right" way to do this by any means. As this post by Phil Sim in Squash suggests, there are issues with the way the Google News algorithms work.
In many ways, all the news services, including Google's will likely continue to evolve rapidly over time, thus remaining in beta in all but name.
So, given the wide disparity in their approaches to news aggregation and presentation, it remains to be seen which approach gains the biggest market share say a year from now.
This is important not only for text-based news TODAY, but also audio and video based News AND content delivery TOMORROW.
Once mainstream users are comfortable accessing their text-based news in a certain way from any and all of the major portals, it's not far-fetched to imagine that interface also becoming the default for multi-media content as well.
This reason by itself is critical for all the GYMAAAE participants to focus on news distribution today.
But the answer to this question will remain in Beta for quite some time.
You've laid out the playing field exceptionally well, Michael. Two other players (more or less) are Lycos which, like AOL, seems to outsource much of its news to Wired but also aggregates some of its own news content and Ask, which seems to follow the Yahoo model of utilizing a very small group of news (AP) and high-end websites/blogs (Ain't It Cool News).
Do you foresee "winning" and "losing" models for how these companies deliver news and if so, who wins and who loses?
Eric Berlin
Executive Producer
Blogcritics.org
Posted by: Eric Berlin | Wednesday, January 25, 2006 at 01:17 AM
Thanks for the comment, Eric. You ask a good question:
>>Do you foresee "winning" and "losing" models for how these companies deliver news and if so, who wins and who loses?<<
Not sure the answer is clear at this early stage, but at the very least the outsourcing model seems to trade expediency today for strategic advantage tomorrow.
In that way it's reminds me of when Yahoo!, AOL AND MSN all outsourced their search functionality to Google because it was viewed as expedient and not a core capability.
If I'm right about the importance of developing your own capability in how your mainstream users CONSUME this content, then Google's approach obviously seems to be the most strategically sound, even though they may make lots of mistakes along the way.
Thanks again,
michael
Posted by: Michael Parekh | Wednesday, January 25, 2006 at 06:31 AM