p2pnet - rss feed: Google un-news
p2pnet news view | P2P:- When I start work in the morning, usually at around 3:30 am Pacific, I kill hand-submitted spam —- not a lot these days, I’m glad to say —- and start checking various sites looking for potential news items.
The first dozen or so I visit include, in no particular order and not exclusively, MONITOR Today! an Ottawa tech portal, TorrentFreak, the Dutch .torrent news site, Ray Beckerman’s Recording Industry vs The People, the huge RIAA document archive and short posts on Big 4 misdeeds, Michael Geist, the Ottawa law professor who’s become an unofficial Net spokesman, and so on.
I also go to Googlenews.ca. But I’m starting to wonder why I bother.
Google bills it as a news site. But if that’s so, its collection algorithms need a serious overhaul.
That’s if you expect your news to be current. If you don’t, no worries.
I’ve noticed story briefs and headlines sometimes stay online literally for hours, if not entire days, on end.
One example was p2pnet’s QuebecTorrent post, which appeared as a main page lead on Saturday and which stayed there until Monday, when it was relegated to the tech section. But even then it was the principal item.
Not that I’m complaining. But I very much doubt it was the only story on the subject and even after I’d done my own update reporting QuebecTorrent was back, thinly disguised as Torrent411.com, the first post continued to occupy a prominent position while the update wasn’t mentioned.
The same thing happened with our ‘sheep to the slaughter‘ story which was on the virtual front page all day, as were, I believe, the Hawking and Ancient Mars posts.
I’m in Canada but I bet the same thing happens on all of the other (more than 40) localised main ‘news’ sites.
Is it time for Google to stop calling these pages news pages, or at least post something somewhere telling visitors how often they can expect stories to be updated?
Or not, as the case seems to be?
Jon Newton - p2pnet
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July 18th, 2008 at 11:47 am
Well you can atleast shrug and put a positive spin on it cause
“there’s no such thing as bad advertising”
Probably fairly good advertising.
Google bot could also explain your sites recent stash of hits ?
July 18th, 2008 at 12:17 pm
^^ “Google bot could also explain your sites recent stash of hits ?”
Nope. Every now and the p2pnet gets that sort of traffic through not only Google, but also Slashdot, etc.
Cheers!
July 18th, 2008 at 11:34 pm
Google also monitors sites for popularity by sometimes using a redirect link instead of posting the site’s actual link. Established News sites such as the NY Times don’t ever seem to get these redirect links. For people using browsers that do not support off-site redirects, this means that they will be S.O.L when they click the links on the Google news page.
It’s possible the ranking is determined by the click-meter.
July 19th, 2008 at 3:26 pm
Funny thing, my Google News does the same thing; I find it quite funny seeing stories about 4th of july still posted w/ the every increasing “hours old” news title… quite amusing.. But I’m in the same boat I tend to think why bother…
I have most of my news going over to SimplyHeadlines which is cool for keeping everything in one format.. and I actually dig the newspaper format…