Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Is Google really gate-keeping?

When we were talking about that Google is acting "psuedo-gatekeeping" today in class, an idea came to me. "How scary! Even though I don't want my taste of news be decided by computers, I'm still too lazy to look for news outside Google news!" True, Google is not really setting a gate and block information, but the impact is similar in terms of what users receive eventually.

So I'm getting curious about how great the impact is. If we can pick some stories from a news organization, and see how much Google news contributes in terms of traffic when the story is on Google news, versus when it's not on Google news. I think Google news has turned the competition between news organizations more bloody. If your story doesn't beat all other similar stories, the story will lose most of the traffic from Google news. (If we can track how many users do go to news stories other than the one Google picked, that will be even more interesting because we can really see the difference.)

Anyways, getting stories onto Google news will be important if the revenue comes from traffic. (KXAN has been trying to get its news onto Google news, but ... And Statesman is always there!)

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