Email Alerts by Google are Marketing, Not News
News alerts are instrumental to users who want to know in real time when articles containing certain keywords are published on the web. Pity PR companies are taking over.
Online News Alerts are the only way of keeping up with constant flow of news coming from the ocean of content, apart from subscribing to individual feeds from desired sources.
Select keywords, add email address, et voila - emails are fired directly to the inbox to alert users when there is something new on the web about their favourite topic.
Admittedly, the forest of growing websites is thickening, and it has become difficult to tell what’s news, what’s re-fried, what's gossip, what's plain false, and what's
information useful to the reader.
It still takes a trained human, or a discerning reader, to tell the difference.
Google alerts
Google was among the first to set up news alerts, to which so many have become 'addicted' to. They have been both a blessing and a curse, at times
Lately, however, in trying to provide more relevant service, the alerts contain mainly headlines from newswires - public relation companies who get paid to distribute press releases - and mainstream press.
Maybe in the days of 'infotainment' the mightly search engine can't tell the difference between 'information' and 'publicity'?
News alerts users are complaining that they are not getting the alerts as they used to:
"Although in theory I can set a preference to select the source of my alerts - by choosing 'comprehensive', or 'blogs' or 'news' alerts - I no longer receive alerts from all the specialist sites that I want to get the heads up from, unless I subscribe to their RSS feed directly" says J. Meyers, a Us based web editor who produces news and reviews on global politics. "Recently Google seems to be sending out news alerts only if they come from press release distributors or from large paid for news sources owned by global news corporations, and we know what kind of 'news' that is." "I can subscribe to such services directly, I don’t need a search engine for that. I need a search engine to alert me when there is a new story on a website that is not in my bookmarks, or that I would not otherwise know about. I don’t seem to be able to get that anymore" says Meyers
Apparently, Google Alerts has started to send out email alerts only if new articles, webpages or blog posts make it into the top ten Google News results, the top twenty Google
Web search results or 'top ten' Google Blog Search results for your query, even when the user does not want to narrow them down to such sources.
Top Ten
Top ten? Based on Quality? Originality? Traffic? Page ranks? Number of readers? Uniqueness? Truthfulness? Accuracy? Journalistic experience? Rapidity? Richness of content? Diversity? Who can tell?
Only Google knows
Content-wire, after being alerted by readers, has been looking for an official policy, a rule, guidelines, but it seems that headlines are now selected arbitrarily without necessarily distinguishing between 'pure marketing' alerts from 'information'
In fact, mixing the two, rather dangerously.
To provide readers with a selection of 'paid' news alerts is great, only if it's balanced by critical, independent and unbiased commentary. Preferably by non-institutional news sources. Anyone wanting to read the news from Reuters and Associated Press, know where they can do so. It's the smaller publishers who need headline distribution to reach their readers, not the established ones.
Otherwise news alerts become a pure instrument serving mass media and market forces.
This is one of the highest risks for internet media today: that the influence of large vendors takes over the space completely. This is true especially in the IT industry.
Many key industry information producers who until today relied on Google alerts to get their word out, are now quietly been dropped, and this is perceived by emerging web based publishers as an attempt to obfuscate their presence on the online news landscape.
"A reader who wants to get their news alerts from 'comprehensive' news sources should be able to do so, and should be able to exclude publicity and marketing materials from their headlines, if they so wish" complains a reader who wants to stay anonymous. "Now this does not seem to be possible from Google alerts"
This could even lead to claims of unfair competition, thinks a legal advisor from an international competition law David Lassier "By allowing a small selection of websites to provide alerts, Google is ignoring the news coming from 99.9% of the internet, and is exposing the users to an arbitrary selection of alerts not based on clear, published and fair criteria I would be surprised if sooner or later, someone would not complain"
What’s out there
Yahoos News alerts are by contrast becoming more comprehensive as if attempting to close the gap that Google is leaving behind, according to observers, who say that search engine Metacrawler.com would be in the best position to fill the news alert gap in the current market.
It looks like there is a good market opportunity ahead for a ' really simple news alert service' that can be configured to fit the user profile, and startups should not going to miss this chance.
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Comments
Jason Well yes, but... I
Jason Well yes, but... I cant click on the stuffs that is not there. Google being the champion that it is, should have a separate section for'press releases' , a clear policy for inclusion, and an option 'include all the web' for the users who want comprehensive alerts Otherwise, its going to loose its edge You know, we believe in Google and have no doubt that its going to fix those damn alerts soon - they are making a big mistake, and they are not feeling confortable about that either, from what we hear. It's market pressure.
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