
Google Supports the News Industry - wnbc
https://australia.googleblog.com/2020/09/how-google-supports-news-industry.html
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formalsystems
This argument fails when you consider Google pushing AMP on news
organizations. It is akin to a news stand telling newspaper publishers "if you
print your paper using my font and paper, I'll put you front and center,
otherwise enjoy your paper's new placement on the back shelves".

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SpicyLemonZest
I'm not sure I follow what you're referring to here. I have some concerns
about Google's UI for AMP, but as far as I know they don't downrank sites for
not using it.

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floatingatoll
> _Google Search indexes AMP pages to provide a fast, reliable web experience.
> When an AMP page is available, it can be featured on mobile search as part
> of rich results and carousels. While AMP itself isn 't a ranking factor,
> speed is a ranking factor for Google Search. Google Search applies the same
> standard to all pages, regardless of the technology used_

Google can render their own proprietary page format more rapidly than a normal
page, when it’s been loaded down with advertising and tracking anyways.

That performance difference results in a ranking boost for sites using AMP
versus their normal site. They could get the same ranking boost by simply
using first-party ads and dropping all the tracking cruft, but for whatever
reason AMP is an easier sale to them.

The fight against AMP is difficult because Google is leveraging publisher
greed for tracking data to sell them on a lock-in proprietary format, and
trying to argue against AMP from a web health perspective goes nowhere because
it’s not focusing on the problem of publisher greed for tracking data.

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lecarore
The arguments are quite solid but I'm having a hard time swallowing that pill,
what are the valid counter arguments here ? Not just "Google bad" but some
actual examples of Google screwing with journalism. I feel like news agencies
are using Google as a scapegoat, saying that what Google is doing (indexing
their content) is wrong, but I'm not sure they'd be better off if Google
decided to return a blank page for any news related search worldwide. We'd
have to actually open their homepage yeah, or use RSS, which wouldn't be the
end of the world as a user, but their articles would see way less traffic.
Sounds to me like their argument is "business was better before the internet,
Google is the internet, therefore Google should pay us for the damage".

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cateye
This is a really hard problem because news is inherently biased, political in
nature and the incentives are on all sides huge.

EU Copyright Directive is requiring tech giants to license the right to
reproduce copyrighted material on their own websites. It could make it
impossible for Google to display brief snippets and photos from news stories
in its search results without paying the news sites.

As a consumer, I find it difficult to form a clear opinion about it:

At one side, I don't want Google to become too powerful and can filter what
reaches me as "news". It is also not fair that Google is earning
disproportionate amount of money by facilitating search on the content of news
agencies while they aren't getting anything.

At the other side, I want to easily find different sources for news with
different perspectives and I don't want to be dependent to a couple of big
news agencies like AP and Reuters.

I guess there is simply no black and white solution and that a balance needs
to be struck with policy for distributing the power in a weighted way between
the different actors.

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xhkkffbf
Sorry Google, but you've burned all of your good will long ago with the news
business. The industry is decimated and you've taken all of the ad revenue
while prioritizing a business model that all but forces the newspapers to give
away their content.

I would never trust any plan from Google, especially one that claims to be
"supporting" the news industry.

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saithir
Google investigated Google and found nothing wrong.

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ahmeni
It's a very bizarre and false claim that Google doesn't "use" news content and
that they are doing this as some sort of altruistic system of "allowing these
publishers to make money by showing their own ads". Google itself serves ads,
runs a massive ad network and makes a ton of money in the process. Every point
in this process that they touch, be it search results or AMP pages or even
destination pages that use Google Analytics are of some benefit to Google
either directly as ad revenue or indirectly as data capture.

