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."