GeorgeHopkin.com

Straight from the horse’s mouth, some of the myths and mysteries regarding which stories are indexed by Google News and why. Or not:

Often publishers ask us why Google News didn’t include one of their articles, or skipped the image associated with an article. In the search for answers, we’ve noticed that there’s a lot of confusion about how we include and rank articles. We’d like to share some of the facts, and debunk the myths.

The quick-read version:

Having an image next to your article improves your ranking MYTH

Updating an article after posting it will create problems with Google News TRUE

Timing the publication of your article improves your article ranking MYTH

Articles that are just images or video won’t be included TRUE

There’s no way to see why my articles weren’t included in Google News MYTH

Publishing a sitemap helps my rankings MYTH

Redesigning my site may affect my coverage in Google News TRUE

If I put AdSense on my site, my article rankings will improve MYTH

More: http://googlenewsblog.blogspot.com/2008/04/psstsecrets-of-google-news-exposed.html

comScore has released several key findings from its Digital World: State of the Internet report, which highlights the changing dynamics of worldwide Internet usage.

Key findings include (taken from comScore’s summary):

·          The U.S. now accounts for 21 percent of Internet users worldwide.  While growth in the number of Internet users in the U.S. has slowed, several Asian and Eastern European countries continue to add new users at a rapid rate.

·          Google is the dominant search brand in most countries, including most of Europe and Latin America, with a few significant exceptions — countries where Chinese, Korean, and Russian languages dominate.

·          Chinese language search engine Baidu currently ranks #3 in worldwide search market share, behind Google and Yahoo!

·          The number of worldwide visitors to social networking sites has grown 34 percent in the past year to 530 million, representing approximately 2 out of every 3 Internet users. MySpace and Facebook are in a tight battle for the global leadership position, each attracting more than 100 million visitors per month.

·          Online video has become the dominant online entertainment format, led by the global popularity of YouTube with more than 250 million visitors in January.

·          The Internet has become an important source of news for most Web users.  The top 10 global news brands show great diversity between country of origin, including the U.S., U.K., China and South Korea.

More: http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=2115

Via comScore comes news that YouTube (owned by Google, of course) served one in every three online videos watched in the US in January:

comScore (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released January 2008 data from the comScore Video Metrix service, revealing that YouTube.com accounted for one-third of the 9.8 billion videos viewed online in the U.S. during the month. The total number of videos viewed in January was down slightly from the more than 10.1 billion viewed during a record-breaking December 2007.

Google Sites once again ranked as the top U.S. video property in January with nearly 3.4 billion videos viewed (34.3 percent share of videos), gaining 1.7 share points versus the previous month. YouTube.com accounted for more than 96 percent of all videos viewed at the property. Fox Interactive Media ranked second with 584 million (6 percent), followed by Yahoo! Sites with 315 million (3.2 percent) and Microsoft Sites with 199 million (2 percent).

More: http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=2110

Via The New York Times, Google is testing video ads in its search engine result pages (or SERPs, if you go for SEO acronyms):

Google has always had a love-hate relationship with advertising. Its power and wealth come from the $16 billion a year of advertising that it sells. Yet on its most important pages, the results from its Web search engine, it has limited ads to nothing more garish than a dozen words of text.

That is about to change. On Thursday, Google started testing video ads on some pages of search results. And it is developing ad formats with images, interactive maps and other more elaborate features.

More: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/14/google-tests-video-ads-on-search-results-pages/

 Via good old Guardian.co.uk, Google is snapping at the ad revenue heels of ITV.

Google may have to wait another year to overtake ITV1 as the UK’s biggest single advertising income generator, despite announcing UK revenues of $2.53bn (£1.3bn) for 2007.

The web giant had been widely tipped to overtake ITV1 in terms of ad revenue during 2007 and may still achieve that when ITV unveils its full-year figures next month.

One key point to consider:

A US regulatory filing lists Google’s UK revenues as $2.53bn for 2007, though around 30% of these advertising revenues will be passed on to affiliate publishers.

That means $759m - around £389m - was paid out to Google’s UK-focused ad affiliates last year.

Or to put it another way, around £12.50 for each person in the UK.

More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/feb/19/digitalmedia

Among comScore’s findings: Yahoo! sites ranks as the top US ad publisher with a 19 per cent share of online display ads.

Publisher: share of display ads, display ads per visit
 
Yahoo! Sites: 18.8%, 20.5
Fox Interactive Media: 16.3%, 47.5
Microsoft Sites: 6.7%, 9.8
Time Warner Network: 5.8%, 10.1
FACEBOOK.COM: 1.5%, 8.4
eBay: 1.2%, 8.4
Google Sites: 1.0%, 1.3
Viacom Digital: 1.0%, 20.6
United Online, Inc: 0.5%, 18.3
Amazon Sites: 0.4%, 8.2
New York Times Digital: 0.4%, 11.5
CBS Sports: 0.3%, 22.4
COMCAST.NET: 0.3%, 4.0
PHOTOBUCKET.COM: 0.3%, 16.8
BEBO.COM: 0.3%, 27.2
ESPN: 0.3%, 6.2
Weather Channel, The: 0.3%, 8.8
NFL Internet Group: 0.3%, 12.9
Ask Network: 0.2%, 3.4
Glam Media: 0.2%, 11.9

comScore reports: “One dimension to understanding a site’s ability to monetize its content is the number of display ads it serves. Of the top 20 ad publishers, Fox Interactive served the most display ads per user visit to its sites (47.5), a particularly high number that is a function of both site engagement and how many ads are displayed per page.  Bebo (27.2), CBS Sports (22.6), Viacom Digital (20.6) and Yahoo! Sites (20.5) each served an average of more than 20 display ads per user visit.”

More: http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=2045

comScore reports that Facebook has made it into the UK’s top 10 web properties ranking for the first time:

“The Christmas season had a significant impact on the prevailing traffic trends in December,” said Bob Ivins, EVP of European Markets for comScore. “Eight of the top ten gaining properties were retail-related as consumers shopped for holiday gifts online, and online greetings also proved popular. That online coupon sites also grew so strongly suggests consumers may have been a bit tighter with their wallets this Christmas season.”

December’s Top 25 (rank in December, name of web property, total unique visitors that month): 

1: Google Sites, 29,292,000
2: Microsoft Sites, 27,760,000
3: eBay, 21,683,000
4: Yahoo! Sites, 21,070,000
5: BBC Sites, 18,016,000
6: Amazon Sites, 16,309,000
7: Time Warner Network, 14,387,000
8: Ask Network, 13,937,000
9: Wikipedia Sites, 12,567,000
10: Facebook.com, 12,438,000
11: Fox Interactive Media, 12,224,000
12: Home Retail Group, 12,211,000
13: Apple Inc., 11,690,000
14: Bebo.com, 11,212,000
15: Lycos Europe Sites, 10,937,000
16: CNET Networks, 9,626,000
17: Tesco Stores, 9,587,000
18: DMGT, 8,238,000
19: Dixons Stores Group, 8,078,000
20: British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB), 7,792,000
21: Play.com Sites, 7,666,000
22: Viacom Digital, 6,647,000
23: Adobe Sites, 6,280,000
24: Kingfisher, 6,109,000
25: Orange Sites, 5,864,000

More: http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=2029

Via John Ellis at RealClearMarkets, is Google about to buy The New York Times?

What’s in it for Google? Well, for one thing, it’s cheap. Sell off the New England properties and the real cost is $3 billion. That’s not much money to buy one of the premier brands of the information age. It also comes with some excellent real estate, which further reduces the risk. And happily enough, it will probably get cheaper in the coming months. So the price is definitely right.

Second, Google is embarking on an ambitious mobile platform. It is buying wireless spectrum and will soon introduce Google Mobile. In so doing, it is entering into an arena where the established players have hired (almost) every lobbyist and (almost) every law firm with expertise in telecommunications in Washington, DC and in virtually every state capital. Owning the New York Times would level that playing field in one fell swoop.

This would also fit in with John Battelle’s idea that Google is making a play for the second click.

And while it’s not in the same league as Google, let’s not forget that the NYT Company acquired About.com in March 2005, which (according to their own info) is ‘a top 10 content site‘.

And speaking of content, Google would also be buying the highly respected New York Times Syndicate and News Service, giving it tremendous reach outside of the US.

More: http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2008/01/might_google_buy_the_new_york.html

Fancy taking Google’s experimental search for a spin?

Alternative views, keyword suggestions, keyboard shortcuts, left-hand search navigation, right-hand contextual search navigation…anyone remember how Google started out?

Via Folio magazine, US mags are buying into web and digital projects in a big way:

Magazines announcing digital initiatives—video, content sharing partnerships, integrated marketing, social networking and anything other buzzy product related to Web 2.0—increased by more than 33 percent in 2007, according to year-end data by the Magazine Publishers of America scheduled to be released later this morning.

More: http://www.foliomag.com/2008/magazine-digital-initiatives-33-percent-2007

Via the Gurdian’s tech section, it looks like rumours of the internet’s death at the hands of video overload may be a little premature:

BT is boosting Britain’s attempt to remain at the top of the global broadband market with plans to install a network at Ebbsfleet in Kent that offers speeds 20 times faster than the average UK household connection. The company hopes its deployment of the UK’s fastest ever residential network, at the development of 10,000 new homes, will be a crucial testbed as the government, regulator Ofcom and industry come to decide how to upgrade the country’s broadband network.

More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/10/btgroupbusiness.internet?gusrc=rss&feed=media

Via Venturebeat.com, social networking is still VERY big business:

Gaia Online, the virtual world for teens, siad media conglomerate Time Warner has invested an undisclosed amount in the company. San Jose, Calif.’s Gaia says it has nearly three million monthly users. It also has a growing population of users on Bebo, who sign into the Gaia OMG application and play a miniature version of the virtual world (see [Venturebeat’s] article from earlier today).

More: http://venturebeat.com/2008/01/08/time-warner-invests-in-teen-virtual-world-gaia-online/

And via Niall Kennedy’s blog, you wouldn’t want to pay Google’s electricty bill:

Google currently processes over 20 petabytes of data per day through an average of 100,000 MapReducejobs spread across its massive computing clusters. The average MapReduce job ran across approximately 400 machines in September 2007, crunching approximately 11,000 machine years in a single month. These are just some of the facts about the search giant’s computational processing infrastructure revealed in an ACM paper by Google Fellows Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat.

More: http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2008/01/google-mapreduce-stats.html