google news

Tips To Publishers From Google News

It turns out that there are a lot of differences between Google’s regular web crawler and the Google News crawler. And though very few of us will find our content included in Google News, it still seems like a good idea to make our content conform to their technical requirements. Here are a few of them:

  • In order for our crawler to correctly gather your content, each article needs to link to a page dedicated solely to that article. We’re unable to index articles from news sections which consist of one long page rather than a series of links that lead to articles on individual pages.
  • If your articles are located in a drop down box, we won’t be able to crawl them. Google News is unable to crawl articles only accessible through a drop down menu.
  • Google News does not recognize or follow Flash, graphic/image or JavaScript links which link to articles. Our automated crawler is best able to crawl plain text HTML links.
  • Google News doesn’t crawl articles in PDF format, although this content is included on Google Web Search. Our automated crawler is currently best able to crawl plain text HTML sites.

Richard Sambrook Talks Citizen Journalism

I’m not sure what to think of Richard Sambrook appearing to struggle to find a place for traditional journalism in the age of the internet, but the story’s worth a read.

David Weinberger […] talked about the crisis in US journalism with failing trust in the big news organisations. He pointed out that Google now provided a news service with just an algorithm where there used to be a newsroom of dozens of people — and suggested algorithms were probably more reliable than journalists anyway! So if information is commodotised, and the public can tell their own stories, what’s the role for the journalist? I came up with three things — verification (testing rumour and clearing fog), explanation (context and background) and analysis (a Google search won’t provide judgement). And journalists still have the resources to go places and uncover things that might otherwise remain hidden. Citizens can do all of those things, but not consistently, and with even less accountability than the media.