Competition, Critics and Lawsuit Weigh on Google News

Posted on March 27, 2005

Google News has been a leading algorithmic news service. It provides a searchable database of news stories from thousands of stories. Critics have always said the news was unreliable at best because it has no editors or ranking and just lumps all the news together using algorithms but consumers find it very useful.

Lately Google has seen increasing competition from new news search services and news aggregators including Topix.net (recently partially acquired by three news publishers), Yahoo News, MSN News Search, Technorati, Findory and others.

Recently, Google was forced to remove photos and news stories published by French news agency Agence France Presse from Google News. If more respected publishers decide to pull their content then Google News could quickly become less valuable of a resource since it would be both less comprehensive and contain less quality content.

News publishers do get a big benefit from the service as it pushes traffic to their websites. CNET says Google climbed to a new traffic record in February, 2005 of 5.9 million visitors. Those visitors find news stories on Google News and then end up on the websites of news publishers. It seems unlikely that many publishers are going to be willing to leave Google News and abandon the traffic they are receiving.