Brazilians strip Google News bare: News barons decide to pull out Members of the National Association of Newspapers in Brazil (ANJ) have decided to stop Google from displaying snippets of their content on the internet giant's 'News' service. ANJ, which represents publishers making up approximately 90 per cent of the newspaper circulation market in Brazil, said that the appearance of its …
By directing people to read our articles, they're taking away our business. This just seems silly, it basically comes down to "Our business model isn't working online as well as it did in brick and mortar stores, so we're blaming google despite the fact it's the only way half the people would find our service in the first place"
I mean I'm sorry, but some people pay good money to get that kind of advertisement to their sites, and they're getting it for free. What are the bets google will remove them from all search indexes, subscription will drop further, and then they'll complain that google has stiffed them by directed traffic to competitors.
Not so sure.
With the current instant gratification generation, unless you grab them in that first sentence or two then there would be no click-through. If they can get people to come to them first then they have a clear run whereas if people are using Google News then you are competing with every news agency in the world for that first screen of 'snippets'. No matter how well written the article, if it doesn't show on the first page you are nowhere.
I appreciate that Google is the most common search engine (regardless of people's opinion of it) but at some point you have to look at whether the click-through count is worth the loss of control. If Google want to play hard-ball then reverse the problem and buy sponsored results instead so that they then have to make the decision over whether it is worth losing revenue to block the search results.
If they don't want to appear then they can use robots.txt to tell Google not to index them. If they want their superior content to be ranked higher they can put a +1 widget next to each story. So their destiny is more in their control than they would imply. But if there are 100 sites with similar first paragraphs and the only content people want is the first paragraph, then what is the value of their content?
Just using my personal experience, the snippet in Google news doesn't give anywhere near enough information about a story and I am far more likely to click on the link through to read it if it interests me.
In fact using Google news I visit sites I would most definitely not visit normally (eg. Daily Mail UK) just because they've managed to bag an interesting story or have an interesting take on something.
If it doesn't work for them why doesn't the online news outlet just take 5 minutes to add a robots.txt file to their site? They can see the impact and then remove it if it doesn't work out for them.
As for removing all the Belgian links from the search engine - well seeing as the search engine links give a page preview and snippet as well, then surely Google could potentially become liable for that as well?
An easy way of finding all thenews articles I want to read.
And I never go to sites not linked onthere as they don't exist.
Type in a common new search term eg Saville, Badger, Flooding or something like that, and see what comes up.
And more which sites do NOT come up.
BBC, Telegraph, Guardian, Independant ALWAYS come up
Mail, Yahoo, Metro, ITV OFTEN come up
Local papers here.
Mirror, Scum SOMETIMES come up
Express, Times, Star RARELY come up
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I live in Brazil, and we have a running joke here where someone starts reading a news item that is choke full of omissions, completely misrepresents the subject, and barely even gets grammar right – then someone else says "damn, you're doing it again... You're reading local press articles!"
Such is the state of Brazil's national press.
So I think this is actually great for Google News: their feed just got rid of that much useless junk.
Nobody clicks-through the syndicator's summaries of ANJ articles, so the ANJ blames the syndicator, whilst blithely ignoring the possibility that their articles are simply crap. Even better, the ANJ then takes "revenge" on the syndicator, by withholding said crap articles from syndication, thus ensuring nobody will ever see them.
'The newspapers had complained that Google had been "unnecessarily aggressive" in removing them from the search engine.'
Sooo,.. they want to be removed, but still receive free advertising ???!!!
WTF does "unnecessarily aggressive" mean ? They said remove links, so when Google did just that they complained that they, erm... removed the links???
Morons
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