Google News won’t rank you top, even when you broke the story and have the best article
Techcrunch broke the news about Bahtiyar Duysak, the German who worked for Twitter who, on analysing one of US president Donald Trump’s Tweets, considered that he had broken the website’s T&Cs, and shut it down.
This blog post isn’t going to go in depth into the rights or wrongs of this. What it does illustrate, however, is how Google News serves up the news.
Remember I said that Google cozies up to corporate media these days? That even as recently as five years ago, if you broke the news, you got the hits, because Google News would rank you ahead of those others who followed you and possibly took your article?
I could only give my own example (at Lucire). But here’s another, where Techcrunch not only originated the story, its version is far superior to all those that followed. I think most of us would agree that the first and best should be ranked first. But look at the media names that appear. (One screen shot is from when I was logged in; the other when logged out. In neither case does Google rank Techcrunch at the top.)
I’m going to repeat something I said last month: there’s a gap in the market for a website that spiders news and serves the search results in meritorious fashion. It should also have a human team that can decide, initially, which media outlets should be considered, and potentially an AI that can learn how to pick the best.
That used to be Google News, but for years, it hasn’t been. And there are very negative consequences for the fourth estate and the societies served, including harming the incentive to create in-depth journalism.
Who will take up the challenge of creating a proper news spidering service using real sources, and treating us all the same regardless of one’s bank balance and influence?
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