Search Engine Roundtable: New Reports: Google Search Getting Dates Wrong Again. “I am seeing some new reports, some publicly, and some not, of Google Search getting the dates they display in the Google Search results wrong. This is a common issue that Google has struggled with over the years but recently seemed to have been getting better at.”
Search Engine Roundtable: Google News Magazine Support To Be Discontinued December 18, 2023. “Google announced that it will discontinue its Google News magazine service starting on December 18, 2023. Any magazines you purchased and that are available within the Google News apps or news.google.com to your library of magazines will be removed.”
Business Insider: Google’s latest job cuts were pretty targeted and reportedly included several ‘director decapitations’. “At an all-hands meeting on Wednesday following the layoffs, Google News VP, Shailesh Prakash, said the cuts were made to ‘streamline’ the company, Command Line reported, citing unnamed sources. Prakash also noted that Google hired too many people during the pandemic and now, ‘there’s a reckoning.’”
CNBC: Google cuts dozens of jobs in news division. “Google cut dozens of jobs in its news division this week, CNBC has learned, downsizing at a particularly sensitive time for online platforms and publishers. An estimated 40 to 45 workers in Google News have lost their jobs, according to an Alphabet Workers Union spokesperson, who didn’t know the exact number.”
NiemanLab: Google News Initiative grants in Africa and the Middle East yield mixed results, study finds. “Innovation — in newsrooms and elsewhere — takes more than a new idea. It requires transforming that idea into value for the organization… A new study investigates reasons that one-year grants supplied by Google News Initiative in Africa and the Middle East resulted in a number of projects that fall short of that definition, instead producing ‘minimum viable products’ that were under-realized versions of the original ideas.”
Search Engine Land: Google fixes Google News indexing bug. “Google has confirmed it fixed the ongoing issue with Google News indexing. This resulted in many publishers seeing massive traffic declines from Google News for a three-week period, starting around June 21st.”
Reuters: Google to block news in Canada over law on paying publishers. “Google said on Thursday it plans to block Canadian news on its platform in Canada, joining Facebook in escalating a campaign against a new law requiring payments to local news publishers.”
I’ve made v2 of Gossip Machine and it’s about 1000% better! I made the first version of Gossip Machine last summer. It uses Wikipedia pageview data to find days when Wikipedia articles got especially busy traffic. Those dates are then turned into single-day Google searches. This version analyzes only a month of page views at a time. For each day it generates a z-score. Z-scores above 1 are filtered and presented in order of Z-score, with a red bar indicating how busy the page was compared to the mean for the month. As with all the Gizmos, it’s free and there are no ads except for a Patreon banner.
PC Magazine: Google News Showcase Lands in US, Lowering Some Paywalls in the Process. “Instead of Google showing headlines and snippets of news stories and leaving it up to news sites to make money off that content (often via a display-ads market that multiple antitrust lawsuits say is twisted by Google’s exploitative conduct), Showcase has Google pay news sites directly for the right to feature those stories.”
Toronto Star: Justin Trudeau shows no interest in compromising with Meta, Google over online news bill. “Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is showing no interest in compromising with Meta and Google over a proposed law that would make them pay for Canadian journalism that helps tech companies generate revenue.”
Do you like news? Do you like local news? Do you like local news that is confirmed to be local news and not just what some SEO convinced Google was local news? I made something for you. Marion’s Monocle v2 uses the #FCC license database to look up American #TV stations by state and group them by city. Once found, you can either explore the stations’ Web space via a Google search or look for recent news stories indexed by Google News. It’s free, no ads except for a Patreon banner. https://searchgizmos.com/mm2/.
I’ve created a list of most available Gizmos at https://searchgizmos.com/biglist/ . There are 45 Gizmos listed with categories including Wikipedia, Google Web search, Google News search, and location-based search tools. Everything’s free and there are no ads, but it probably won’t work on your phone.
SwissInfo: Google should pay millions for Swiss news, says study. “According to a study carried out on behalf of the German-language publishers’ association Schweizer Medien, published by the 24Heures/Tribune de Genève newspapers on Friday, 86% of people in Switzerland use Google to obtain online information…. When using Google, over half of users (53%) stay on Google’s ecosystem and do not click further on links to the publication’s website – they are generally satisfied with the information appearing on the Google search page.”
Reuters: Google tests blocking news content for some Canadians. “Alphabet Inc’s Google is rolling out tests that block access to news content for some Canadian users, the company confirmed on Wednesday, in what it says is a test run of a potential response to the government’s online news bill.”
Engadget: Google launches its News Showcase program in France. “Google has launched News Showcase in France, and it has teamed up with over 65 publishers representing over 130 publications for the program’s expansion in the country. Now, users in France will see panels populated by articles from participating publications when they navigate to the News tab on Android, iOS or the web and in Discover on the mobile platforms.”
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