Hindi Song | Linking to Stories Hosted on Google News may not be a Good Idea

Google News used to be a search engine but since last year, they started hosting stories from news agencies like the Associated Press and Agence France-Presse as these services, unlike Reuters, don’t have dedicated websites to publish their own content.

This is probably a very successful experiment because according to bloglines, more than a million blog posts have cited Associated Press stories that are actually hosted on Google News. Similarly, there are over 3,000 articles on Digg that again link to news stories hosted on ap.google.com.

The Associated Press and other newswire agencies may have never seen that kind of exposure had they not done a syndication deal with Google but there’s a small problem – all wired news stories published on Google News have a very short life-spam and expire after 30 days.

That means if you link to some current Google News story from your web page today, that link will return a 404 only after a couple of weeks and all your site visitors will see is this message.

Broken links are an absolute no both from the perspective of visitors and search engines. It may therefore be a good idea to link to CNN, NYT and other news websites where those stories will stay forever.

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Hindi Song | After Books, Google is Busy Scanning Old Newspapers of your Great Grandpa’s Era

Google just announced that they are scanning millions of pages of old newspapers and will make that content available through Google News Archives. With this, they also got one step closer to their mission of "organizing world’s information."

Google scanners will scan everything that appeared on the newspaper page including vintage advertisements, crosswords, cartoon strips, illustrations and even those rare photographs that appeared during your great grandpa’s era. See example.

Also see: Search Old Newspapers & Magazines with Google News Archives

Spam Sneaks into Google News Archives

I was playing around with Google News Archives and was surprised to see that lot of spam content has managed to sneak into Google News. For instance, a search for "mughal rule" suggested pages that were either commercial websites or blog posts - see this screenshot.

The same happened with another search query like "rani laxmi bai" - none of the top results can be classified as "news sources" and they are purely commercial websites.

This is so surprising because according to Google Terms, only newspaper publishers and aggregator with historical content can submit their content but it looks like spammers have managed to trick the process.