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Why Has Google News Not Taken Off Like Their Competitors  (View post)

* Miss Universe [PersonRank 7]

Tuesday, June 24, 2008
15 years ago4,329 views

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/24/technology/24google.html

Excerpt:
..... the company is far from achieving the kind of dominant position in news that it has in other areas. Six years after its start, Google News appears to be stuck in neutral and struggling to keep up with rivals.
Several online news experts say Google News has changed little, especially when compared with services like Google Maps and Gmail, which add new features at a rapid pace.

Perhaps as a result, traffic growth is sluggish. With 11.4 million users in May, Google News ranked No. 8 among news sites, far behind Yahoo News, which was No. 1 with 35.8 million visitors, according to Nielsen Online.

Its growth rate of 10 percent over the last two years is far slower than those of most other large news Web sites. In the last two years, second-ranked MSNBC.com grew by 42 percent, adding 10.4 million users. Traffic at CNN.com and nytimes.com grew even faster.
While it is clearly past the experimental stage, Google News still shows no ads, and there are no signs that Google is serious about making money from the site directly.

“I’ve actually been surprised at how little it has evolved, at least on the surface,” said Dan Gillmor, director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at the journalism school of Arizona State University. “I’m guessing that Google isn’t so sure what to do with it.”

[snipped]

TOMHTML [PersonRank 10]

15 years ago #

Google should take example on Wikio, which is really as good as Google News and/or Google Blog Search. With a touch of Digg.
http://www.wikio.com/ [available in English, French, Italian, Spanish and German]

Above 2 comments were made in the forum before this was blogged,

Peter [PersonRank 0]

15 years ago #

I still think it's an indispensable service, even if only growing slowly – it helps keep the other outlets in check – a little bit.

It does seem they've done nothing with it, though, over the past couple of years. Some Google services are just like that – blogger, etc. – they just get worse and worse over time usually. I'd be curious to know if it's just laziness/incompetence on the part of certain project managers, or if it's upper-level management who just decide to abandon certain products for whatever reason.

I'm also curious about a lack of advertising. Some advertising is highly entertaining and informative, and can really fill out an offering.

Marc [PersonRank 0]

15 years ago #

there has been alot of Google news in well the news and i was thinking is it not simply duplicate content from other sites in which case should Google penalise itself according to its loathing for duplicate content?

Ethan [PersonRank 0]

15 years ago #

It's also important realize that, probably much more so than Google News alerts and the Onebox, people are accessing Google news through their iGoogle start pages, which HAVE become much more popular in the past 2 years. Google news gadgets should be included in this growth analysis.

pavan [PersonRank 0]

15 years ago #

Google news gadgets should be included in this growth analysis.

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