Re:French news sites prevail in negotiations with Google ove...
by lhorie on Friday January 22, 2021 @01:08PM
(#25874280)
Doesn't it go both ways though? If there's a financial cost for Google to show links to articles, wouldn't it then be in Google's best interest to decrease the quantity of shallow articles that all more or less say the same thing with ever clickbaitier titles, in favor of showing fewer authoritative/comprehensive sources?
Re:French news sites prevail in negotiations with Google ove...
by pb7 on Friday January 22, 2021 @02:00PM
(#25874867)
In before Google gets accused of manipulating search results to favor certain flavors of news publications over others.
Re:French news sites prevail in negotiations with Google ove...
by lhorie on Friday January 22, 2021 @02:42PM
(#25875416)
They already do that, though?
Re:French news sites prevail in negotiations with Google ove...
by pb7 on Friday January 22, 2021 @02:49PM
(#25875491)
Do they? Care to share any kind of evidence?
Re:French news sites prevail in negotiations with Google ove...
by lhorie on Friday January 22, 2021 @04:41PM
(#25876663)
For example, google something like "Trump" in the US vs Canada and you'll get different news outlets (e.g. wapo vs ctv).
Or watch right wing videos in youtube in incognito mode and compare home page recommendations with the ones in your regular account.
Historically, they've also changed their search algorithms to prioritize certain types of web properties over others (for example the Google Panda update). Etc.
The crux is that all those "information" sites want you to click even if you are totally not interested with the story.
That's why you get all those titles like "prime minister was running around naked", so you think "what the heck is going on with our PM", and then it turns out it was prime minister of some obscure country and it happened 30 years ago.
Today clicks matter, page overlay adds matter, subscription invitations matter, and so on. Google cuts significant number of those if you can see a snippet of the article and it is clear that there comes some cheap click-bait.