Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Google ruling: News Headlines as valuable

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This morning as i was going to work on mass transit i looked over the shoulder of the person in front of me to see an article about Google-i just read the headline- the rest of the print was too small-the bold headline was valuable.


The article was about a ruling in Belgian courts around Copiepresse and Google displaying their headlines and snippets from their web publication. Last week i posted about screen scraping and legal ramifications and this ruling is back to that subject.

From Webpronews some details;


Order the defendant to withdraw the articles, photographs and graphic representations of Belgian publishers of the French - and German-speaking daily press, represented by the plaintiff, from all their sites (Google News and "cache" Google or any other name within 10 days of the notification of the intervening order, under penalty of a daily fine of 1,000,000.- € (1.27 million USD) per day of delay;

Also order the defendant to publish, in a visible and clear manner and without any commentary from her part the entire intervening judgment on the home pages of 'google.be' and of 'news.google.be' for a continuous period of 5 days within 10 days of the notification of the intervening order, under penalty of a daily fine of 500,000,- € ($635,000 USD) per day of delay.

This ruling comes after Google announceded its recent AP deal and the News Archive search service. With both of those moves, Google is once again pointing to the value of pay for premium content. We all however know that there is also value in headlines-if they are returned to the user in context. I have made that argument to clients for years when they start looking at usage- a user can browse hundreds of headlines quickly giving them a lot of good information without clicking through too many-if any articles. Remember i didn't start this post by telling you that i ripped the paper out of the readers hand- the headline was enough to prompt my further research (yes i used factiva.com to find out more once i got online in case you are wondering)

What i focus on in solving information delivery issues is seamless access to content on demand when and how the user needs it. Seeing an article headline that you need to quickly make a business decision and getting prompted for a username or a credit card is frustrating. Productivity and compliance issues drive many enterprises to work with premium content aggregators whose primarly pbusiness is in gathering validated trusted content, normalizing, categorizing and then delivering that content however a client wants it.

As enterprise workers continue to feel more comfortable using search as their primary tool and the influence of the Google model of simplicity- i see how tools like Google search with Enterprise controls (allowing companies to point to specific premium content) are going to be a core to news content delivery in the enterprise. I already see some clients doing it (and they have been doing it for years with some other enterprise search engines as well)- but honestly i am not convinced that the search interface is going to be the only place for delivery of highly relevant news. So as services like Google start opening up access to APIs that get to that content is when the conversation starts getting both interesting and exciting. But first we need to figure out the model of publishing premium content in today's web world.

every once in a while i like to remind my readers that....
The posts on this blog are provided 'as is'’ with no warranties and confer no rights. The opinions expressed on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent those of my past,future or present employer.


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