Duncan Riley> Google News is broken, and the unresponsive morons running Google News have a lot to answer for.
Now please don’t get me wrong, I supported Google News when it initially refused entry to a number of blogs on the basis that they did not report news. I even accepted them throwing out the Blog Herald after a campaign by a few prominant bloggers. But enough is enough. Google News is broken, and its gettting worse. Sites that are nothing more than bulliten boards, brief comment sites and other sites that do nothing more than reprinting advice columns (with permission) from other sites are the standard these day, and the more Google allows this to continue the worse the service gets.
Now, I subscribe to a number of Google Alerts, and my alert for “blog” this morning delivered me this little gem:
BLOG AD WARS: The Revenge of the Delusional
NCrumors.com – Lincolnton,NC,USA
Emperor Blount needs our support! We need to keep him in power and his assistant JarJar Peaslee. The Emperor has a plan to create …
Now I’m sure that the people running the site a very nice people, and it’s nothing personal, but page 3 of a message board allegedly about blog advertising that is nothing more than Star Wars fans making jokes than about any serious news wasted my time and that of others when they clicked on it. And my question is this: when did message boards become legitmate sources of quality news?
Sure, I could complain to the Google News team, but they’ll ignore the email and doing nothing about it like they do with any other email most people send them. There is also a raft of new blogs in Google News now that continually get listed in the “blog” search because they are blogs, not actually reporting on blogs. Yahoo! doesn’t manage to have this problem, nor does Topix for that matter. With both services getting better by the day, and PRNewsweb now offering RSS feeds on search terms, my need for their email alert service is diminishing every day, and as Google gets bigger and bigger, and more and more unresponsive, the only thing they risk is losing more and more business. If even Microsoft can get their communication strategies and listening caps right, I don’t see why Google cant.
