Google's Changes to Google News and Search Raise Eyebrows

Posted on May 9, 2005

Two of Google's latest products are causing some computer industry professionals to question Google's plans. There is concern about Google's plans to rate news sources in Google News. And there are copyright and privacy concerns about Google's new Web accelerator software.

Google has filed a patent for enhancements to its news service that allow it to rank stories based on quality and timeliness. This has raised concerns that Google News will focus on established media outlets and filter out smaller and less established news sources. Google News current returns results based on the recency of the article and how closely it matches the keywords people enter. The new pattern would add a quality filter in addition to the existing parameters.

The EcommerceTimes says, "Critics are already noting that the approach might be flawed or at least misleading. Short of having news stories read by experts who could rank them based on quality, the technology will instead rely on pre-determined factors such as the reputation of a news site, how much Web traffic it generates and how old and large the organization that produced the story is in terms of news bureaus and employees."

Google's Web Accelerator speeds up web surfing by pre-loading content in the background. However, this practice raises copyright concerns because Google does not own this content. There are also privacy concerns because Google can see what people do on these pages since they are now loaded by Google's servers. Jeff Jarvis explains in a recent blog post critical of Google's Web Accelerator. He says, "This means that the page is served from Google rather than from a publisher's server, which means that the publisher cannot count the traffic and serve targeted and dynamic advertising."

Jarvis says another issue is that Google will be able to see how people use sites it does not own. He says, "Google will know what the consumers on my site are doing better than I will for these 'accelerated' pages."

Time will tell how well Google News works if it implements the new filter. It may not be a total disaster for small publishers. However, we don't think pre-loading is the best way for search.

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