Google, please clean up Google News
Google News is a strange product. On the surface you have some great features and a useful service but when you scratch the surface and use the search box it’s like stepping back in time.
The entire Google News service is built around the fact that an editor has to manually approve every news source before it goes live. So why is the system full of terrible content and press releases?
Google News is a computer-generated news site that aggregates headlines from more than 4,500 English-language news sources worldwide, groups similar stories together and displays them according to each reader’s personalised interests.
Unlike the normal search results where the algorithm is in control Google News could clean up the entire system with probably a weeks work. All they would need to do is search for the top few hundred commercial keywords and look through some of the stories being displayed. The spam content is very obvious and nobody in their right mind would let half of the sites pass a manual review.
Google is basically giving spam sites and people who syndicate press releases a free ride in a product that requires manual review before the sites are allowed in. It makes no sense at all.
Check out the results for SEO and read some of the stories. Is this the sort of great newsworthy content that people from Google actually read?
I see an Indian SEO agency with a press release and a recruitment agency posting job adverts.
If you agree that Google News is full of spam leave a comment below or via Twitter.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.
Comments
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Yes i agree with you, even i try to add my press release in Google news but unfortunately failed.
It’s not just press releases, though. Secondary sources re-writing wire stories, biased and unskilled reporters, pay walls and registration walls, sites full of invasive and loud and animated ads that take forever to load…
I recently realized that the only Google News links I bother clicking are ones to the Google-hosted Associated Press articles. Everything else is basically trash.
There’s a lot of discussion out in the newspaper world about how to make the currently necessary transitions, but one thing that often gets ignored is that newspapers have always competed against a very small number of other local news sources. The web lets me go straight to the best in the world, and newspapers simply aren’t competitive on that level.
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October 28, 2009 at 3:36am