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To: rrufff who wrote (517)	9/24/2002 11:08:16 AM
From: StockDung	Respond to of 838

Google to launch news search site PALO ALTO, Calif., Sept 23 (Reuters) - Google, the popular Internet search engine, launched a new site on Monday for searching news from 4,000 English-language sources, from The New York Times to small-town newspapers. The new service, called Google News, will be accessible through a tab on the Google start page (http://www.google.com/) and will pull real-time news from different Web sites around the world. News will be arranged under categories such as world, business, entertainment, technology and sports. Search results from the news site will also be offered at the top of Google's general search page so that users who enter search terms on the main site will also see when that term is mentioned in the news. Google is not employing any editors to work on the service but will arrange the abundance of news it gathers with the same basic technology it currently uses to rank search results in order of relevance. The company said its technology will rank news based on how recently it has been published, the number of articles devoted to a given topic and the popularity of the particular news source. "News is a natural extension of our mission," said Marissa Mayer, product manager at Google.com. "We're harnessing the collective judgment of editors around the world." She said the company began working on the Google News service in January. So far, it appears that Google has tapped into a huge audience, Mayer said. Pageviews on the new site jumped from the tens of thousands to millions after the news site went online at midnight on Monday. Until Monday, Google had operated a bare-bones news aggregation service that drew from about 150 sources. While several Internet content sites offer links to top news sites, the Google service will be more comprehensive than most, if not all of them. Google said it was aiming to use its technology in new ways, rather than compete against news aggregation sites, such as Yahoo Inc. <YHOO.O>, aside. The Yahoo Web portal is a major Google client and uses Google technology to deliver search results. Google is initially offering the news service for free, without any advertising support. It said it plans to see what kind of demand the site generates before it considers possible ways to make money from it. 09/23/02 20:33 ET

To: rrufff who wrote (517)	9/24/2002 11:12:06 AM
From: StockDung	Respond to of 838

news.google.com

To: rrufff who wrote (517)	9/24/2002 11:15:55 AM
From: StockDung	Respond to of 838

09/06 13:15 CBS MarketWatch.com Google's brand could kill search biz for partners [external] cbs.marketwatch.com

To: rrufff who wrote (517)	9/24/2002 11:20:41 AM
From: StockDung	Respond to of 838

Google -- the portal for news? By Bambi Francisco, CBS.MarketWatch.com Last Update: 2:34 PM ET Sept. 23, 2002 SAN FRANCISCO (CBS.MW) -- Google unveiled its service for news Monday, the latest move to build upon its popular platform for search, and potentially compete with its portal partners. The service aggregates more than 4,000 English-language news sources from around the world, such as The Financial Times, CNet's (CNET: news, chart) News.com, TheStreet.com (TSCM: news, chart), The New York Times, USA Today, Reuters, Fox Sports, and ABC News. It includes a fast crawler and a photo search. A more limited version of the service, which is still in beta form, has been available for a few months. While many articles aggregated on the Web can be found via stock ticker and are ranked based on freshness, articles listed on Google are ranked based on Google's search methodology to rank relevance. The algorithm is based on many factors, including how often and on what sites a story appears on the Web. The service could give Google yet another product of aggregated search listings to sell to its growing list of portal customers. Those customers have been signing on for Google's paid listings of advertisers, which generate money for both Google and the distribution partners every time a user clicks onto one of the advertisers' links. It's a proven moneymaker in an environment where revenues and profits are scarce. It's also a business that Overture (OVER: news, chart), with $650 million in expected sales this year, defined, dominates and is aggressively expanding to retain its lead. Overture allows advertisers to bid for placement in its search results. Advertisers pay the amount of their bid only when a consumer clicks on their listing. Google has made progress against Overture, however, partly due to its relationship with portals. Google's initial search product is the backfill or algorithmic searches it sells to many portals, such as Yahoo (YHOO: news, chart). But because of Google's clean site and its reputation as a pure search engine, users began to bypass the portals and go directly to Google's site. Some estimates indicate that about 40 percent of all searches are currently done on Google. This has raised questions regarding Google's paid listings, and perhaps its news search service. How does Google build trust among distribution partners when the strength of its brand name could eventually kill the search business of these partners? As Google CEO Eric Schmidt has said in the past: "We have convinced them [portal partners] that their traffic goes up when their users use Google."

To: rrufff who wrote (517)	9/24/2002 1:06:57 PM
From: StockDung	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 838

Maybe CNN, ABC Should Merge With Google Mark Lewis, 09.24.02, 12:21 PM ET NEW YORK - These words are being typed by human hands--mine--but if you're reading this story on the new Google news page, it was selected and slotted there by a computer. Google, the Internet search firm, is still fine-tuning its news service. But the page already looks impressive enough to throw a mild scare into the more costly legacy systems--i.e., the human beings--who program the content at other Web sites. Not that the flesh-and-blood editor is obsolete. After all, Google's computer merely culls the news stories, all of which are written and edited by real live people, from other sites. At its core, the gathering and editing of news necessarily will remain a human function. But at the periphery, computers can do more than they do now, which means people will do less. The cost-cutting imperative will see to that. Which brings us to today's Los Angeles Times report that AOL Time Warner (nyse: AOL - news - people ) and The Walt Disney Co. (nyse: DIS - news - people ) have discussed the possibility of merging their news operations. The idea is to combine AOL's CNN and Disney's ABC News into a stand-alone joint venture. The point would be to save money--at least $100 million per year and perhaps far more, according to the Times. The deal would sound great to a computer, but people are more difficult to program. Especially media mavens with outsized egos. The question of who would dominate a combined CNN/ABC operation is one with painful implications for the junior partner. In this case, that presumably would be ABC News, which already suffered a collective ego bruise earlier this year when Disney expressed itself entirely willing to dump Ted Koppel's Nightline from its prized time slot to make room for David Letterman. Letterman ultimately decided to stay with CBS, but various media pundits expressed dismay that bottom-line ratings concerns could so easily trump ABC's public-service mission to deliver the news. Those same pundits may take a similarly dim view of any CNN/ABC combo, or CNN/CBS combo, or any media combo at all that is designed to cut costs rather than to improve the product, expand the diversity of voices and perform all the other approved missions for pure-at-heart media executives. These advocates of righteousness tend to mutter darkly about the huge conglomerates that dominate the media landscape, which no doubt are conspiring to abandon news altogether and switch to "all Britney all the time" to maximize profits. Relax, folks: Look at Vivendi Universal (nyse: V - news - people ), which is falling apart before our eyes; or Disney, which this week is struggling to explain to its shareholders why owning ABC is such a good thing; or AOL, the very model of the modern media conglomerate, which has seen its stock price shrivel as Wall Street loses faith in the mix-and-match strategy. When the dust finally settles, consumers still will be getting the news they need, and from a wide variety of outlets. Chalk it up to that pesky human element: People want to get the news, so it will always be profitable (at some level) to provide it to them. That will keep a fair number of journalists gainfully employed for the foreseeable future. Just not at Google. More From Forbes Steve Case Stays Put 09.19.02 The AOL Time Warner chairman holds his own, and that may not be such a bad thing for the embattled firm. Cablevision Courts AOL 09.16.02 The concept of the combination isn't new, but now the time may be right.