Eppy-google
Josh Cohen speaking to Editor & Publisher conference in Las Vegas
Running notes by Bill Densmore
Cohen talks about businesses built on controlling the flow of information are turned on their head. He wants to talk about the postive things about this.
- Google isn't talking about saving the news industry but talking about re-inventing it.
- In the tech world, there is always somebody gunning for you. He puts up images of AmericaOnline and MySpace.com as he talks about companies "that got passed by." Then he adds logo of Microsoft and Yahoo -- and then the logo of Google with a question mark on top of it.
- The opportunity is "to innovate through this . . . we can emerge with a much more robust version of what the news industry can be."
- "At Google we don't have all the answers. I think it is safe to say we don't know what all the questions are at this stage." Looking at finding the ability to inform more and more people. "Journalism matters to us and it matters to more and more of our users."
Talking about how Google works with the news indusry
- Krishna Bharat developed Google News. He felt the delivery of news was a "tremendously inefficient process." He wondered about finding an automated way to pull links together and have similar stories matched together. In the beginning of 2002, the first version was release.
- 50,000 sources, 30 languages and 60 editions in 40 countries. Now ends publishers about 1 billion clicks every single month. If you add Google's other service, that figure quadruples. "We crawl it, we group it, we rank it."
- The look at the HTML code for instructions from publishers about what is to be crawled and what is not to be crawled. Each day that results in several hundred URLs available for organizing. They index it all, do a full-text analysis, look for key words or metadat about the story to group it in story clusters.
"Reflect the judgement of your editors"
- Final step is ranking. It's a two-step process. There is story or cluster ranking. You take 50 stories and rank them 1 to 50. And there's article ranking, to rank a story within a given cluster. "What we're basically trying to do is reflect the judgement of your editors ... what stories they think is important."
- Article ranking: They look at a ton of signals. Looking for originality and novelty. Rehash is different from original. They look for location: "If there is a local source doing original reporting on a story." They look for things about the quality of the source. They look at volume of original publication and user feedback to help make those distinctions.
Maintaining the sense of innnovation
He throws up a screen with the question: What's your news source today? It includes the logos of Digg, Facebook, New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal and Gmail.
Google news was unique and innovation when it began, Cohen says. "If we are going to keep doing what we are doing, which is to help people find the news they are looking for, we have to keep innovating." He says he wants to preach about innovation. "Change is permanent and there really is no single solution or answer to all the issues you're being faced with."
Three golden rules for innovation:
- Ship early and ship often?
- Analyze the results and data
- Iterate
They are trying to apply those principles to the news space.
Google news tomorrow: Customization
- They are experimenting with Google customization. Right now a small subset of Google news users are being asked to fill out a survey to given explicit advice about what they want to read.
- "Another thing we are thinking about a lot is this idea of serendipity." The stories you don't know you want to read until you see them. "We have been trying to a few things try and surface that content better." What have they been doing on this:
- The "Spotlight" section. Longer shelf-life stuffy. (Densmore comment: Isn't this like The AP's idea of "landing pages?") Longer shelf-life more viral content.
- The Fast Flip application. A different user interfact. Launched in Google Labs last year; 100 titles are participating. Latency matters, creates a "discovery mode" application where tiny snippets of full HTML page views load in split seconds. You browse visually and can discovery more quickly. "The intial results have been really positive -- three times more visits to stories and six times more time spent." The are excited and are working on shortcomings.
- Editors' Picks: Launched last week. These are recommendations selected by human editors at participating news organizations like WashPost, NY Newsday, People magazine.
What about engagement?
There's a big difference between time spent on print news and time spent online news. Much more on print. Google is trying to close that gap.
- One thing that does this is the application programming interface (API) to Google Maps, available to all to program to. He gives examples of uses by the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
- YouTube Direct: Puts a call to action on a video, asking users to take some action. HuffPost, WashPost, Politico, Chicago Tribune and Al Jazeera are all using this.
- Google Translate: BBC and Boston Globe are using this with their World Cup coverage.
Question Cohen asks: How can we tackle engagement for tomorrow?
Another idea they have worked on is "Living Stories." The put some of Google's engineers in the New York Times newsroom to think about a new way of presenting news. In a three-month experiment, their editors reform their stories in a new structure so that all the stories are in one place. (Densmore comment: This also sounds a bit like AP Landing Pages, as well as Matt Thompson's idea about create context pages for ongoing news issues.)
"Living Pages" plug in for Wordpress available
What they learned from "Living Pages." People spent about nine minutes on these pages. "If you create really copelling jouranlism and you display it in a really compelling way as well people are going to come to it more often," says Cohen. They have now released a free plug-in for Wordpress for people who want to try this approach.
