Fixing Google, slinging Bing

Google is broken -- and the residents of Cringeville have a few ideas about how to fix it. Microsoft Bing? Not so much

Dan Lyons, perhaps better known to residents of Cringeville as the evil genius behind the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs blog, has a curious piece in the current issue of Newsweek talking about the rivalry between Google and Microsoft.

It's curious, because Lyons -- who usually seems like a pretty sharp guy -- doesn't seem to understand how Google News works. Among other things, he writes about Microsoft's alleged attempt to bribe Rupert Murdoch into letting Bing index his empire of right-wing sites, while leaving Google out in the cold.

It's easy to see why Murdoch might like Ballmer's proposal. Murdoch has been grumbling for a while now about Google getting a free ride on his content. Google creates abstracts of news articles, places ads next to them, and keeps all the money. Google insists this lopsided arrangement is fair because some readers click on the abstracts and get directed to the original article.

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Dan Lyons, perhaps better known to residents of Cringeville as the evil genius behind the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs blog, has a curious piece in the current issue of Newsweek talking about the rivalry between Google and Microsoft.

It's curious, because Lyons -- who usually seems like a pretty sharp guy -- doesn't seem to understand how Google News works. Among other things, he writes about Microsoft's alleged attempt to bribe Rupert Murdoch into letting Bing index his empire of right-wing sites, while leaving Google out in the cold.

It's easy to see why Murdoch might like Ballmer's proposal. Murdoch has been grumbling for a while now about Google getting a free ride on his content. Google creates abstracts of news articles, places ads next to them, and keeps all the money. Google insists this lopsided arrangement is fair because some readers click on the abstracts and get directed to the original article.

[ Also on InfoWorld: Google's cracks are showing, as Cringely uncovers in "This blog has NOT been brought to you by an algorithm" | Stay up to date on Robert X. Cringely's musings and observations with InfoWorld's Notes from the Underground newsletter. ]

The problem? Google News doesn't carry ads. And if you use regular old Google to search for "Fox News" or "Rupert Murdoch," you won't see any ads either. (At least, I don't -- your mileage may vary.) Google News stories might show up among other Google search results -- and ads might appear next to them -- but that's really not what Murdoch and the other publishers deciding whether to block Google bots are complaining about, if I understand them correctly.

(Lyons also called Google's Chromium OS a "knockoff" of Microsoft Windows. I get the feeling maybe Dan was hitting the hard cider a little too hard over the T-Day break.)

Google isn't actually monetizing news stories -- yet. I expect they will eventually, and like most things Google touches, that too will start laying golden eggs. But as I've stated here ad nauseum, Google News is broken in many other ways, from how it "decides" what story is most prominent to how it rewards me-too stories with often higher rankings (and more traffic) than the original sources.

SearchEngineLand's Danny Sullivan spoke with Google's Josh Cohen last week about how G-New's algorithms work, but I can't say that anything Cohen said bears any resemblance to my experience using the service. For example:

Cohen also explained more about the balance between ranking the latest content versus the originating content:

"Say you publish something and then someone else sources you but adds no real new information. If they come after you, you don't want to penalize the original source for being first."

As if. Like that doesn't happen 14,876 times a day.

So I put the question out to Cringesters: How would you fix Google News? Reader T. S., who's also a professor of engineering at a large midwestern university, suggests using the same solution academics have employed for generations: peer review.

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