search engines – Page 3 – Journalistopia

Blogger takes long view, makes metrics discovery

ProBlogger Darren Rowse made an interesting discovery when he took a closer look at his blog’s metrics: one of his blog posts received more traffic from StumbleUpon than from Digg — but he had to take a long view of the data.

What made Rowse’s revelation interesting was that, in the short run, he received nearly three times more traffic to the post in question from Digg than from StumbleUpon. However, when he checked back 43 days later, he discovered that StumbleUpon surpassed Digg’s total traffic by more than 1,000 views.

The Lesson: My guess is that most of us news types like to check how hot a story is either the day it breaks or within the next few days. However (for those of you whose content sticks around the site for a while), make sure to check the metrics a few months later. You may be surprised at how much traffic you get in the long run, as well as where it’s coming from.

[Via JournalismHope]

Journalistopia Cartoon: June 3, 2007

Place on your blog:

-More in the cartoons category.

-Read the latest on the legal wrangling over Google News here.

-Watch the EPIC2014 Googlezon video here.

Your news site needs people pages

Search Engine Watch reports that 30% of searches done on Google and Yahoo are for the names of people. While there isn’t a breakout of what percentage of that figure is Britney and Paris, there’s still a key point here:

Your news sites should be more aggressively building search engine-friendly pages about popular figures. All of your newspaper’s previous stories about these people are a gold mine of valuable, keyworded content that can drive traffic to your site. See Times Topics for a good example of this.

The best part is once you set up your page to automatically bring in stories based on keywords, it populates itself and will likely bring in viewers with little to no hands-on management necessary. It doesn’t get any better than that.

[Photo by !borghetti]

Report: Google News negotiating deals with UK news orgs

[UPDATE: Google denies the claims made in the report.]

The Sunday Herald in Scotland reports that Google is in negotiations with several UK-based news organizations to license content for their free Google News service. Google has previously reached settlements with the Belgian press, French news service Agence France-Presse, and the Asociated Press.

Media executives rip into Google

A panel of leading media executives took a combative tone against search engines during a panel discussion at the 56th annual National Cable & Telecommunications Association, Reuters reports.

“The Googles of the world, they are the Custer of the modern world. We are the Sioux nation,” Time Warner Inc. Chief Executive Richard Parsons said.

“They will lose this war if they go to war,” Parsons added, “The notion that the new kids on the block have taken over is a false notion.”

Them’s fightin’ words. See the full report here.

How Google Blog Search ranks your blog posts

New details about the methodology behind Google Blog Search results have been making the rounds of the blogosphere.

According to the patent application, Google’s Blog Search uses two main criteria to determine how a post gets ranked:

1) A blog quality score, which measures the quality of the entire blog based on factors like feed subscriptions, incoming blogroll links, PageRank of the blogs and other usual factors used for regular pages.

2) A post quality score, which measures the quality of the individual post by measuring the frequency and relevancy of keywords, among other factors.

So what can you do to make your blog more searchable (aside from writing nice, keyworded post titles)? Here’s the rundown on the positive and negative factors Google Blog Search uses written by SEO By The Sea, who kindly decoded the patent application’s tech-speak [en espaÃ±ol aquÃ por TechTear] :

THE GOOD

popularity of the blog,
Implied popularity of the blog,
Inclusion of the blog in blogrolls,
Existence of the blog in high quality blogrolls,
tagging of the blog,
References to the blog by other sources,
A PageRank of the blog, and;
Other indicators could also be used.

THE BAD

Frequency of new posts,
Content of the posts,
Size of the posts,
Link distribution of the blog,
The presence of ads in the blog, and;
Other indicators may also be used.

Check out the SEO By The Sea post for more details on each of those factors.

When the machines edit your life

It’s like a horrific scene out of EPIC 2014.

E-Media Tidbits’ Amy Gahran highlights the story of Nino Ceritano, a restaurateur whose top Google search was a Roanoke Times story about a murder suspect who worked in his restaurant.

“What do you think when you put in a restaurant [into Google] and a killer comes up?” he asked the Times. [UPDATE: Roanoke Times online editor John Jackson dropped in with a comment today.]

Nino, I think you’re the victim of editing by machine. It’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately while crunching through Database Nation by Simpson Garfinkel (per the recommendation of Adrian Holovaty). One of the basic premises of the book is that much of your personal information is being held largely by third parties over which you have little to no control.

While a news story about a murder is double-plus public information, is it something that a human editor would choose to highlight as the most relevant thing about this particular establishment? Perhaps. Or perhaps not. Is it fair to Ceritano? Is it more important than the amazing Pizza al Pollo? More importantly, if he were to contact Google, would they do anything about it?

It’s possible that they did. The official Web site of the restaurant is now the number one Google search result. Did someone at Google have mercy on Ceritano?

Let’s also take a look at when Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales tried to exercise some control over the information about himself when he altered his own Wikipedia entry. The crowds were incensed. You can read about the controversy on …well… his own Wikipedia entry!

Whether it’s an algorithm run by a computer or crowds of faceless contributors doing the editing, we must acknowledge that there are some dangers associated with becoming too automated. Crowdsourcing can be a beautiful thing, but we must make sure as journalists that we retain the ability to present information with care and humanity.

And on that note, Nino, here’s some keyworded link love for Ceritano’s restaurant.

[CORRECTION: I previously misstated the nature of the incident at Ceritano’s. Thanks Amy.]

Google Maps mashup based on book locations

Now this is what newspapers should be doing to their stories!

Check out the new feature on Google Book Search, where some mashups have been created to show on a map all the locations referenced in the text of the book. A cool one: Around the World in Eighty Days (scroll down a bit). If only they could pop in a Carl Hiaasen book next…

[Via Download Squad]

Microsoft offered cash for Wikipedia alterations

Microsoft got its hand slapped by Wikipedia after it was revealed that Microsoft attempted to pay writer Rick Jelliffe for altering Microsoft’s Wikipedia entry, according to an Associated Press report.

From the report:

Microsoft acknowledged it had approached the writer and offered to pay him for the time it would take to correct what the company was sure were inaccuracies in Wikipedia articles on an open-source document standard and a rival format put forward by Microsoft.

Call me a conspiracy theorist, but perhaps it’s only a matter of time until some media organization gets caught paying off a prominent Digg or Newsvine user. Maybe they’ll even call that person an “Outreach Editor.” Of course, some organizations are already buying search ads on Google for news articles…

Roundup of Yahoo! Local features

Search Engine Watch has published an interesting feature on Yahoo! Local’s attempts to increasingly incorporate user-generated content into their listings. Some of the new features include allowing users to edit business listings by updating outdated addresses or flagging locations that have been closed. Yahoo also commissioned a poll with some interesting results:

The Harris poll also asked users about the effect ratings and reviews might have on their decision to patronize a particular business. Overall, 79 percent of respondents said they’d be likely to be influenced by a rating or review on Yahoo Local, with 9 percent of respondents more likely to be influenced by a review that was negative, 23 percent more likely to be influenced by a review that was positive, and 47 percent likely to be influenced by both positive and negative reviews.

Last fall, Yahoo commissioned Harris Interactive to conduct a poll to gauge users’ likelihood of posting ratings or reviews of local businesses to Yahoo Local. Overall, 67 percent of respondents said they would be likely to post a review, with 9 percent of respondents more likely to post a review that was negative, 8 percent more likely to post a review that was positive, and 50 percent likely to post a review either way.

Yahoo has constantly been adding new features to their site and the latest one launched in 2007 is the dating section. They have a whole list of new things that they can do with the dating section, checking profiles or adding people from Facebook. We will see how it pans out because it looks to be extremely promising right now. It’s not looking like a friend with benefits thing either, mainly for people seeking long distance or serious relationships. They always tend to work out best when you invest the time and effort into it.

Wikipedia’s online newspapers entry

Gggg….rrrkkk….gggkk…GAAAKK!

I’m just about speechless at Wikipedia’s “online newspaper” entry. Steve Yelvington has done the journalism world a service by pointing out this horror and suggesting some of our esteemed academics take a whack at it.

Also check out Dave Carlson’s very cool online news timeline.

Yahoo gets all shook up

The AP reports that Yahoo is going through with its long-awaited restructuring. The changes come in light of their struggling stock price and a notorious memo by one of its vice-presidents, which has been dubbed ‘The Peanut Butter Manifesto’ (read it here), a reference to its investments being “spread” too thin.

So what does that mean for us? I don’t know. We’re just germs caught in the flotsam of the search engines. But it will be interesting to see how and if this affects Yahoo’s efforts to generate news content in-house.