February 19, 2007

Google News isn’t top dog in UK news search, either

Last week, my article, “Is Google News the Tail Wagging the News Search Dog?,” appeared in Search Engine Watch – just as Search Engine Strategies was getting underway in London. The article cited data showing that Yahoo News and AOL News have larger unique audiences than Google News – in the US. So, what’s the story in the UK?

According to comScore Media Metrix, there were 17.3 million unique visitors to General News sites in the UK during December 2006. The #1 site in the category was BBC News, with 7.8 million unique visitors. Yahoo News was #2, with 3.6 million unique visitors. Google News had 2.7 million, The Sun Online had 2.6 million, Guardian.co.uk had 2.5 million, MSN News had 2.4 million, AOL News had 1.9 million, and Times Online had 1.9 million.

UK data from Nielsen//NetRatings provides a similar picture. BBC News ranked #1 in the Online Current Events and Global News Destinations category during December 2006, with 6.2 million unique visitors. Yahoo News was #2 with 2.6 million unique visitors. Guardian Unlimited had 2.1 million unique visitors, Times Online had 1.6 million, The Sun had 1.5 million, Google News had 1.3 million, MSN News & Weather had 1.1 million, and AOL News had 1.0 million.

When I showed this data to people in London last week, many said they were shocked by two findings.

The first was that Yahoo News, not Google News, was the top dog in UK news search.

On the other hand, very few of the people who I talked with in London seemed interested in the strong showing of MSN News or AOL News – or the fact that four of the top eight news sites are news search engines. Most of them appeared to be more concerned about who was on top.

The second shocker was the appearance of The Sun, one of Britain’s “red top” tabloids, in the rankings.

Unlike the “quality” newspaper sites in the UK, the red tops feature photos of scantily clad women on Page 3 and sensational stories like the one reporting that “Brit boobs are biggest.” And, going down-market now appears to be as popular a way of building an online audience as developing distinctive journalism that readers cannot find elsewhere.

Meanwhile, very few of the people who saw these findings seemed even remotely interested to hear that the BBC News is optimizing its headlines for news search engines. Most of the “lads” wanted to turn back to The Sun and re-examine Page 3.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 1:48 PM | Permalink

January 8, 2007

Press releases return to AOL News

If you conduct a news search on AOL News, you will find recent and relevant press releases are -- once again -- included with articles from other news sources. Apparently, their disappearance over the holidays was caused by a bug -- that's now been fixed -- not a change in policy.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 1:10 PM | Permalink

January 4, 2007

MSN's Live Search News giveth and AOL News taketh away

At some point during the holidays, MSN's Live Search News started to include press releases in its results. At roughly the same time, AOL News stopped including press releases in its results.

Of course, the first news search engine to treat press release distribution services as "news sources" was Google News, back in September 2002. Yahoo! News started including press releases in its results in March 2004. And press releases are mixed in with the results at Ask.com News Search and Topix.net.

According to a report from Outsell, press releases have become the top news source of knowledge workers. Outsell called this an “eye-popping shift in most-used information types.” Only 10% of knowledge workers in the corporate sector used press releases as news sources from September 2004 to January 2005. This changed dramatically from November 2005 to February 2006, when Outsell found 37% of knowledge workers using press releases as news sources.

Press releases leapfrogged over trade publications to become the top news source of knowledge workers. Roger Strouse, Outsell Vice President and Lead Analyst, has offered several possible explanations for the rising popularity of press releases. “It may be that press releases are easier for people to get their hands on,” he told InformationWeek last year. “It may be that press releases are shorter and pithier,” he added.

It will be interesting to see if this trend accelerates or decelerates this year -- with MSN's Live Search News adding press releases to its results, while AOL News is deleting them.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 9:32 AM | Permalink

December 19, 2006

Top news searches differ from top web searches

When is a search term not a search term? That’s a question worth asking after looking at a year’s worth of search results on Google, Yahoo and AOL.

Google has just released its 2006 Year-End Google Zeitgeist. To compile its year-end lists and graphs, Google reviewed a variety of the most popular search terms that people typed into its news search engine as well as its web search engine.

Here are the top searches in 2006 on Google News:

1. paris Hilton 2. orlando bloom 3. cancer 4. podcasting 5. hurricane katrina 6. bankruptcy 7. martina hingis 8. autism 9. 2006 nfl draft 10. celebrity big brother 2006

Now, compare the list above with the one below for the top searches in 2006 on Google:

1. bebo 2. myspace 3. world cup 4. metacafe 5. radioblog 6. wikipedia 7. video 8. rebelde 9. mininova 10. wiki

To state the obvious: The top news search terms are completely different from the top web search terms.

If you go to Yahoo’s Top Searches of 2006, you will also see some striking differences between Yahoo’s Top 10 Searched News Stories of 2006 and Yahoo’s list of the most popular web search terms this year.

The tragic passing of Steve Irwin and the mysterious death of Daniel Smith rank as this year’s top searched news stories. Interest in the Middle East also dominated the top rankings in 2006, with conflict in Iraq, the Israel Lebanon conflict and the Saddam Hussein trial all ranking well.

Here’s Yahoo’s list of top news search terms for 2006: 1. Steve Irwin death 2. Anna Nicole’s son dies 3. Iraq 4. Israel and Lebanon 5. U.S. elections 6. Fidel Castro stroke 7. North Korea Nuke 8. Jonbenet confession 9. Saddam Hussein trial 10. Danish Cartoon

In other words, it appears that one group of people is turning to Yahoo News Search for hard-hitting information.

Meanwhile, on another part of the portal, Britney Spears topped Yahoo’s list of most popular web search terms in 2006 – for the fifth time in six years. The rest of the search engine’s overall top 10 searches for the year were dominated by the under 30 celebrity set making a mark on pop culture.

Here’s Yahoo’s list of top 10 web search terms for 2006: 1. Britney Spears 2. WWE 3. Shakira 4. Jessica Simpson 5. Paris Hilton 6. American Idol 7. Beyonce Knowles 8. Chris Brown 9. Pamela Anderson 10. Lindsay Lohan

In other words, it appears that an entirely different group of people is turning to Yahoo Web Search for celebrity happenings and scandals – or the same group of people is conducting news searches in the office by day and different set of web searches at home by night.

If you go to AOL’s 2006 Year End Hot Searches, you’ll discover that it, too, appears to have a split personality.

The top 10 news topics at AOL News for 2006 were: 1. Gas prices 2. Steve Irwin 3. Immigration 4. Bird flu 5. Iraq 6. Natalee Holloway 7. Debra Lafave 8. Rush Limbaugh 9. Lebanon 10. Hurricane Katrina In other words, the group of people using AOL News seems interested in “hard news.”

Contrast that with AOL’s list of the top 10 web search terms for the year: 1. Weather 2. Dictionary 3. Dogs 4. American Idol 5. Maps 6. Cars 7. Games 8. Tattoo 9. Horoscopes 10. Lyrics

In other words, the group of people using AOL Search seems to be looking for general interest information.

So, why do top news search terms differ so often from top web search terms?

One possible explanation might be demographics and/or psychographics. The smaller group of people using news search may differ demographically and/or psychographically from the larger group of people using web search.

And, who knows, perhaps a higher percentage of news search engine users are older, richer, better educated, and more experienced search users with children and homes in suburbs. Or, maybe web search engine users have different lifestyles, behaviors, interests and values. We can’t say.

Why? Because there’s another possible explanation: Situational intent. Each of us often acts differently in different situations.

A new eye-tracking study from Enquiro found that “intent impacts searching.” For research-related queries, we tend to “thin slice” sponsored content out of the way. But, for purchase-related queries, we tend to focus more on sponsored content.

So, maybe most of us use web search engines to look for one type of information and we use news search engines to look for another.

While it may not be clear yet why top news search terms often differ from top web search terms, one thing is perfectly clear. They are often different.

So, using web search term research tools like Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery, Yahoo’s Keyword Selector Tool, or the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to identify potential web search terms makes a lot of sense. But, if you are trying to optimize a news story or press release, then using these same tools to identify potential news search terms may often produce mixed results.

If you are looking for news search terms, you might get better results using Google Trends, Google Suggest for Google News, the Yahoo News “also try” feature, or Keyword Discovery’s news keywords database. But, don’t be surprised if their news search term suggestions often seem surprising.

The most popular news search terms are often different from the most popular web search terms. That’s a fact you can take to the bank – even if we can’t explain why this is true just yet.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 10:52 AM | Permalink

December 18, 2006

2006 Top Searches

Following Yahoo's release on December 4 of its top searches for 2006, last week AOL, Lycos and MSN Live released their top searches for the year 2006. Google still has their 2005 review at Zeitgeist, along with recent monthly totals. Ask.com presents weekly lists, but has yet to release a 2006 year in review.

A closer look at these lists reveals some interesting questions about the differences in the data from engine to engine.

Looking at the slight differences between this data can be an interesting project, and can probably yield some good insight into both the user demographics of each of the engines

Paris Hilton is an interesting example to use in showing how search engines classify types of searches. In Yahoo! and in AOL, Paris is listed as a celebrity, yet she is found in top News searches for MSN Live. Does this mean that people search Live's (formerly search.msn.com) News category when they look for everyone's favorite socialite?

More can undoubtedly be read into the top overall searches reported for each portal. AOL reports: "weather" (does this mean they included all weather-inclusive searches or just the term "weather?"); Yahoo! says Britney Spears is number one (hmm...wonder if that includes people misspelling it?); MSN Live claims that the world wanted to know about Ronaldinho more than anyone or thing else; and Lycos puts Poker at number one. Again, others can fill in the blanks as to what they think the demographics most closely associated with each portal are.

It will be interesting to see what the top Google searches are. It would also be nice to have some more details as to how many misspellings were included in searches and perhaps how many of the searches for each top term were actually contained in a longer keyword phrase.

See also the discussions about this at the Yahoo! Search Blog, and the MSN Blog post that introduced their list. AOL has opened up the floor for discussion at the AOL Search Blog (thanks Susan for the link!). Lycos provides a platform for discussion which can be found at the Lycos 50 Blog. (Thanks Carolyn!)

(Note this story was edited after I discovered that Paris Hilton did make the top celebrity list at AOL. For some reason I missed that originally. Apologies to the AOL team for this oversight. CB)

Posted by Chris Boggs at 10:58 AM | Permalink

November 8, 2006

In The Election Results Race, Yahoo's The Winner

Like many Americans, I wanted to know what was up with the vote in the US midterm elections this morning. As a search analyst, I then wanted to know how the search engines performed in helping me find out. The results are in! Yahoo's the winner by far, but I'd still take the New York Times over it. Come along for an illustrated tour.

Google told us last month that Google Earth was all geared up to be an election guide. That's great if you've downloaded Google Earth and wanted to learn more before the election. But how about a quick, fast summary of what happened yesterday? What's Google got for us?

The Google home page is as minimal as always, no help there -- not even a special logo as in the 2004 race.

How about a search for "election results," which I think is a fair query to try. After all, using Google Trends, I can see a huge spike for that term after the last elections in the US:

I also checked the volume for just "results," and that was even higher whereas "elections" was much lower (see them all compared here). So my two queries for this test were "election results" and "results." On Google, both disappointed.

Here are election results on Google:

CNN's top with 2004 results! I know -- web search is always behind the times. That's why Google inserts that big news results OneBox unit above the regular results. Let's click on the main news link there, which takes us to news results:

Pretty bad. News about the dollar, stock prices -- but who won?!!! I've got to really work to figure this out, especially compared to the New York Times, as I'll show at the end of this story.

Maybe I head to the actual Google News home page:

Nope. I get some headlines telling me about the Democratic house victory, but it could be much better.

FYI, checking on a search for just results, I don't even get the news headlines inserted. Overall, I found Google to be a pretty poor resource.

How about Yahoo? The home page there immediately gives you some news:

If I actually gravitate to the picture and resist the pull of the search box, the "Full elections coverage" link takes me to a Full Coverage page with lots of info, including an interactive results page (my link takes that out of the normal pop-up box, but it still works great):

This is very, very nice. I can see at a glance who is ahead in the race for control of the US House Of Representatives, plus with a click I can check out the Senate or governor races. Selecting any state also gives me the information about races with that state.

I love this. It very similar to what impressed me at the New York Times. I hope Yahoo searchers found it. However, I suspect many bypassed it. To understand why, let's do that search for election results:

Similar to Google, Yahoo inserts a big "News Results" shortcut unit above the regular results, to help detour searchers into the freshest results. Of course, searcers might bypass that. If so, unlike Google, Yahoo has managed to get the CNN 2006 results page up rather than the CNN 2004 page. Nice. After that, there's Fox News 2006. But c'mon -- Yahoo's own special election results are third. This is one case where I'd totally applaud a little hand manipulation to get that to the top, especially to highlight that interactive results summary page.

Still, the web search results for this particular day at Yahoo far outshine Google. That's almost certainly due to some human editing, which is fine. Along with the sites I've mentioned, you get the New York Times politics page, USA Today's politics page, C-SPAN's 2006 results page, the ABC News politics page, CBS News's 2006 page, politics from the LA Times, then the Washington Post's 2006 results page. All of these are excellent choices. If Yahoo did human intervention to make this happen, kudos to them. You can check out a snapshot of the entire page here.

Over at Google, nothing is either timely or general enough. The Virginia state election board, California election info, assorted things dating from 2004 -- then oddly Virginia and California get another bump for their 2006 pages. Ugh. See the entire list in the snapshot here.

What happens if we detour into the news area that Yahoo promotes at the top of the page? Disappointment:

Yes, relevant news stories. And the image results to the side are kind of fun. But some hand help could have made a difference. How about a promo for that awesome election map of Yahoo's?

Let's go over to Ask, where I had high hopes. Ask has made a big deal of its special Smart Answers for the election, and they are cool. But will I see them? Yes, if I search for election:

I'd also get to this box if I went to the Ask home page and clicked on the Election Day link there:

But for election results (what I believe to be the more popular query), all I get is a small news unit:

The news unit will take me over to some news results, but like Yahoo's, these aren't thrilling. It's pick and choose through what you want, rather than any type of easy overview. As for a search on just results, that doesn't even bring back the news unit at all.

The overall web search results, similar to Google, are underwhelming. Nothing really helpful for the 2006 results pops up (see the full results in the snapshot here).

Even the special Smart Answers box, had it shown up, isn't that helpful for what I want now -- RESULTS! None of the featured links with it takes me to results.

Microsoft, what have you got for me at Windows Live Search? On the home page, nothing. For search on election results, it's disappointing old or non-targeted results (screenshot here). Unlike the others, there are no news results inserted above these. A search for just results is no better. If I specifically try a news search for election results, as with the others, there's no attempt to get me a comprehensive overview. It's up to me to review each story and hope for a good match.

Ironically, at the largely overshadowed MSN site, similar to Yahoo, I get a big election photo on the home page along with links, including one called "state-by-state results" that leads to MSNBC here. And over there is a pretty neat "Democracy Dashboard" giving me that type of overview I wanted:

It's a pity Windows Live didn't reach out to either MSN or MSNBC and do something special to point to this or somehow integrate it into the results.

What about AOL? From the home page, it's pretty easy to spot a link to a AOL election page with results for the House, Senate and more:

Searching for election results brings back disappointing Google listings in the main results. However, the new FullView column does a good job of dividing news into elections overall, US Senate coverage, US House coverage and more. And clicking on any of the "View all" links brings up the special AOL election page (see the full page here).

Now to the New York Times. I headed over there pretty much by chance. There are any number of newspapers I might of thought of off the top of my head, and usually its my original home town paper of the Los Angeles Times. But I hit the NY Times today, and boy was I glad.

Right on the home page, above the "fold" is an easy-to-spot election map. In seconds, it organized the most important information I was looking for into a way for me to know what was going on:

Drilling into the full map was even better. There, I could click on any state -- in particular the undecided ones -- and see the current situation:

Just when I was thinking "what if," I saw the "Create Outcomes" tab where I could click on a state and flip it to the Democrats or the Republicans to see how it might go with the Senate. Outstanding!

Other newspapers or web sites might have done as well with similar displays. If so, my apologies that this wasn't a review of the best election results sites. Instead, it was really meant to see how well the search engines held up as information resources for this particular news event.

Overall, I've written many times before that there's a role humans can play in search results. Today -- this was a perfect example of that. Yahoo almost certainly put some human effort into crafting results, and it was the clear victor in terms of quality of what was coming up in web search listings. AOL comes in second, again where human effort has helped its FullView listings help make up for the poor crawler-based results from Google.

In third, I put Google and Ask. Google's results were poor, but at least it floated some news results that may have helped. Ask, I was rooting for. But that Smart Answers box simply wasn't showing up for the queries I thought people were doing. Even if people were getting it for "election," it wasn't helpful to get election results. I really appreciate the effort, and if this had been for something other than actual results, Ask would have been great. In last place -- Windows Live.

This campaign of sorts is also one of those classic "what if" races. With just a little more effort, Yahoo would have had a landslide victory by getting people to its great overview page. The same is true for AOL. Ask, with just a bit more thought, could have had that box coming up for "election results" rather than just "elections" and added some links to get people to actual results. Windows Live, if it had remembered its MSN origins, might not be in last. And Google? A company that's all about organizing information might not have put in such a poor performance if it used some human power in the way the New York Times did.

Postscript: See also Case Study: Digg Versus Google News Traffic from me on my personal blog that covers how this article ultimately brought in lots of traffic from Google News from those unable to find election results there, along with lots of other data and a comparison to traffic from a top story at Digg on the same day.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 4:17 AM | Permalink

October 17, 2005

Blogpulse and AOL Annouce Deal

Our friend, Pamela Parker at Clickz reports on a just announced deal that will bring "daily blog data and trend analysis" to AOL provided by Intelliseek's Blogpulse which also operates its own blog search tool.

Wow, AOL is sure jumping on the blogging bandwagon of late:

Posted by Gary Price at 12:34 PM | Permalink

August 25, 2005

AOL News Now A Top News Search Destination

Today's SearchDay, AOL News Joins the Big League of News Search Engines by guest writer Greg Jarboe, looks how AOL News has quietly become a top news search site, even surpassing Google News, though Yahoo News remains comfortably ahead.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:17 PM | Permalink