Tuesday, August 03, 2004 1:47 PM
According to
Digital Deliverance LLC, which works with clients in online publishing and information broadcasting, while
Google News aggregates headlines from a large number of news sources (over 7,000), it only displays a fraction of these on the Google News homepage. Furthermore, this fraction is made up largely of the usual suspects (i.e., big media) with very little room for smaller players.
If true, this suggests that finding news and information from sources beyond big media would necessitate a user to click through multiple pages beyond the Google News home page. Thinking about how people use search engines, would the average visitor read beyond the first few headlines?
You can read Digital Deliverance's post on the subject and reach your own conclusions. One thing is for sure: as the web's information flow continues to morph, questions like the ones raised here are worth considering.