Newsknife, which monitors the performance of sites within Google News, is reporting that the new de-duplication policy is starting to have an effect.
These results are only for the first nine days of the new policy, which scans stories, identifies duplicate agency copy and then only shows the original in search results. The change is part of a deal - the results of some arm-twisting on the part of the news agencies, we believe - with AP, PA, AFO and Canadian Press, as we reported on the day the deal was announced.
One twist is that Google will host the stories itself if the source agency doesn't have its own website.
Winners will be, well, Google, and users of the service, who will be able to more easily identify which stories add something new. But the move to hosting news content on its own site is a departure for Google, and one that is being met with some concern by news publishers worried that Google is ultimately more ad revenue, even if that hasn't started yet. A revenue share with the agencies could be one option - and then maybe other sites would join in. Who knows?
Newsknife tracks how often sites appear within the first 10 pages of Google News results, and on the homepage.
Guardian Unlimited, the BBC and Voice of America all seem to have benefitted from the new system, which Google claims will move original news reporting higher up its rankings than those than reply on syndicated agency copy.
The most commonly listed sites in August were:
1 Forbes
2 New York Times
3 ABC News
4 Reuters
5 Washington Post
6 Guardian Unlimited
After September 1, when the change kicked in, that became:
1 Guardian Unlimited
2 New York Times
3 Washington Post
4 The Associated Press
5 BBC News UK
6 Voice of America
Newsknife backs Google's point of view that the new policy appears to be good news for original reporting, with those sites "benefited from the down-ranking of some sites based for having less original content, as well as benefiting from its own strong original content".
Dan Gillmor at the Centre for Citizen Media said the deal is proof that "Google's insistence of non-competition with news organizations is utter garbage, and has been for some time".
And Greg Jarboe on SearchEngineWatch says PRs will be more likely to pitch their stories to agencies now, rather than newspaper reporters.
"First, pitch your next big story directly to one of the 3,000 AP journalists in one of the more than more than 240 AP bureaus worldwide. If they write a story, it has a better chance of appearing in Google News than any of the "duplicate articles" that might appear in one of the thousands of daily newspaper, radio, television and online customers that AP serves.
"You may have sympathy for those pesky newspaper reporters, but you job is to get publicity for your corporate clients and their commercial products. And Google News has just announced - as the Onion once did - that this 'scrappy band of lovable misfits is no match for rich kids'."
That's us, then.
