In an interview today with Australian media outlet Sky News, Murdoch hinted that when News Corp sites start charging users for access to content around June 2010, said content will be de-indexed from all search engines. It's an old-school approach to the burgeoning threat of new media, but who wants to argue with a 78 year-old billionaire? And exactly how much share does News Corp hold in the search engine news v. old-guard media battle?

Murdoch continues to criticize Google as plagiarists who steal News Corp content, just as he claims users should never have had access to free content in the first place. Take a look at this video of the interview. Beware: It's long and deeply fascinating:

The most fascinating thing about the interview is that Murdoch points out the sticking points of traffic valuation and monetization that only a 4-billionaire has the right to comment on. Does inclusion in Google News results guarantee clickthroughs? Do clickthroughs guarantee loyal readership? Does loyal readership in any way convert to ad dollars?

Taking it a step further, when one considers the absolutely abysmal rates of conversion of clickthrough users on advertisers' websites, does the funnel of Google News traffic generate revenue from consumers to advertises and thence to publishers?

Or is it all a rhubarb goulash, as Murdoch would have it?

Clearly, there are subtleties to the case, which carries with it every complexity ever pondered by those who attempt to provide value to users - most of whom indignantly refuse to pay for content and accept pirated content as a substitute - and those who guard the economic and cultural longevity of traditional media, many outlets of which continue to provide the most valuable and insightful commentary in a news environment that revolves around instant deadlines, fast-beats-best reportage, and shoddy fact-checking.

But as much as the newsprint-and-ink old guarders among us can appreciate Murdoch's last stand, one appreciates - as a user and as a technologist - the cooperation and innovation of companies such as the New York Times, the BBC, and other very traditional news outlets that have seen the value of distribution, aggregation, and mass information.

If, however, News Corp decides to deny Google bots access to its content, Google news will likely suffer little. Between the Associated Press, Reuters, and other print and broadcast news services, one wonders how much the absence of News Corp listings - primarily represented by the Wall Street Journal and FOX - will affect Google News.

Part dashboard, part feed reader, and all user-friendly, this service promises to be both popular and useful. Users can create sections based on keywords and then publish their sections to directories for sharing with others.

According to a blog post today by Google News engineers Sharad Jain and Nilesh Agrawal, "One of the great things about online news is the ability to filter by topics. Google News has long recognized this, so we've allowed users to track articles based on keywords of their choice. But it has been a little tricky at times. For example, to follow news about topics related to outer space, you would have to create a pretty complex filter.

"Now, if you're using Google News and can't find the perfect section, just create your own! You can do that by adding the relevant keywords. Then, if you are happy with the resulting section, you can publish it to a directory so others can benefit."

Currently, the directory includes such sections as Space, NFL, Day in Photos and about 270 other sections and counting. And just for you, we've created a section all about the real-time web, one of our favorite topics at RWW:

What do our readers think? Is this new feature nifty, or what?

Inbal Drukker, a senior associate at Google News, said on the first and sixth of July that there are "engineering changes" underway to "improve Google News." So what seems like a loss today could end up for the better in the long run, but for now there seems to be a problem.

Update: Marjolein Hoekstra points out that there is a link to create a Google Alert now at the very bottom of the search results page, as well as one to create an iGoogle gadget for a search, but still no RSS link displayed like there used to be.

Thanks to Russ Castronovo for bringing this to our attention.

Playing Both Sides

It is interesting to see how Google and YouTube are courting both 'amateur' reporters (in the best sense of the word) and large media organizations at the same time. Google is clearly looking to strengthen YouTube's position as a hub for news content - and given how the news market is in flux today, it is smartly trying to encourage both pros and citizen journalists to use its site as their default repository for their video content. The core reason for Google to encourage citizen journalists to shoot better and more compelling video, and for courting bigger media organizations, however, is that it is simply easier to sell advertising against professionally produced content.

Of course, as PaidContent pointed out earlier this morning, news organizations and Google News don't exactly have the most friendly relationship. Now that Google News features YouTube videos more prominently on the site, news organizations could potentially profit from this arrangement even though many larger organizations already use white-label video services and sell their own ads against their video content.

Good Content

Looking at the Reporters' Center, by the way, it is nice to see that the quality of the content there is generally very high, and any aspiring journalist can learn quite a lot from the videos that are currently posted on the site.

Is this another sign that a fact-based understanding of the world is being eclipsed by an amalgamation of aggregated collaborative thinking? Or is it the ascent of the best the internet has to offer - crowdsourced news gathering and fact checking as an essential part of the story? We argue it's the later, but it's easy to imagine many people seeing Wikipedia on a news page and feeling pretty cynical about it.

People used to say you couldn't trust anything written on Wikipedia, but they used to say that about the whole internet. While professional news organizations have professional editors and fact checkers, Wikipedia has far more eyes to mobilize in fact checking.

Update: Someone from another wiki news company forwarded us a rejection email from the Google News team. That email included the words: "We can't include sites that don't have a formal editorial-review process for submitted content." Apparently things have changed! Does this mean the doors are open for other less-traditional news sites? Maybe, maybe not - Wikipedia is thought of as quite exceptional. It's a notable policy change, none the less.

Wikipedia is still wrong sometimes, sometimes hot topic pages have incorrect information on them for minutes at a time. The same can be said for traditional media websites, however, and both types of sites have an ultimate interest in correcting inaccuracies as quickly as possible. Whatever information appears on Wikipedia can be viewed in its page-historical context and editing authors can have their personal editing histories examined. Those things can't be done as easily on newspaper websites.

Ultimately it's not about competition between forms of news sites, of course. Wikipedia entries are filled with facts gleaned from professional reporters on other sites. Wikipedia also offers greater background and more links that newspaper pages choose to include in news coverage.

In the early days days of the 20th century, news beat reporters from competing outlets would often share all the information they gathered with each other before writing up coverage and calling it in to their respective newspapers. (They competed on voice, insight and perspective for differentiation.) Perhaps Wikipedia will someday supplement other news coverage in this kind of way, acting as a public clearinghouse for readers interested in an aggregation of all the facts reported, along with more extensive historical context. That sounds like a pretty exciting idea to us. Google News already fills this role itself to some degree, but the web is a many-textured source of information and there are lots of ways that different organizations can contribute to our understanding of current events.

Google added a number of interesting features to Google Image search lately, including the ability to filter pictures by style and color. Now, this new Google Labs project can also find similar images. In our tests, this worked quite well and this new feature should make it easier to find just the right image. Though, for now, it seems like only a select number of images feature the "similar images" link.

Google News Timeline

The more interesting new project, however, is News Timeline. Google Labs already featured the ability to add timelines to your search results and Google News features some basic functions for restricting results to certain dates, but the News Timeline, as the name implies, focuses on news stories and represents a major step forward for this feature.

Users can choose to display the most important stories about a topic by day, month, year, or decade. Most importantly, it is also easy to restrict searches by the type of source, including blogs, newspapers, news photos, and Wikipedia, or the type of content, including music and artwork. Interestingly, some of our searches for blogs also included a number of results from public twitter profiles.

The new News Timeline also features relevant photos and YouTube videos, which play right in the timeline interface. Interestingly, you can also choose from a number of features, newspapers, magazines, and blogs, though the selection here is currently limited to only two newspapers and a handful of magazines and blogs. The timeline will also include media files from Freebase.

A New Look and Home for Google Labs

Google Labs now features a new interface and it also finally has its own domain at Googlelabs.com and an RSS feed. Google has clearly taken to the 'labs' idea and after using it for Gmail and Google Code, it seems like it is ready to roll it out to a broader audience.

Blogs and personal websites are only responsible for a very small 1.5% of all traffic.

There is also a lot of traffic that is directly shared between news sites. Outbound traffic from other news sites accounts for just as many visits as traffic from search engines (21.6%).

According to Hitwise, the Drudge Report is the largest single source of visitors to news and media sites. Google News (1.5%), CNN.com (1.4%) and Yahoo! News (0.8%) also drive relatively large amounts of traffic, but it is interesting that no single site really holds anything close to a monopoly here.

The Associated Press and the traditional newspaper business are obviously under a lot of stress right now (and in many ways, Craigslist is the real culprit here - not Google News and portals), but a large part of traffic to news sites is driven by portal sites. We can't blame the AP for trying to protect its intellectual property rights, but, as Google's Eric Schmidt described it, "these are ultimately consumer businesses and if you piss off enough of them, you will not have any more."

Image credit: Flickr user Matt Callow

Being able to browse through an article in the context of the paper version is a great step forward for researchers. Before, you would either have to dust off old copies in an archive or operate an antiquated microfilm machine (without the ability to do a full-text search, of course). Now, at least in theory, you can just type in a search query and Google will not only do a full-text search of the historical archives, but also show you all the advertising and related articles in the paper itself.

The interface is very similar to the Google Books UI, with the ability to zoom in and out, jump to a specific page, see the page in full-screen etc. One difference, though, is that the advertising is a lot more prominent in this version of the interface.

Hard to Find

All of this sounds great in theory. However, while we were trying out these new functions, we were barely able to find any material that was presented in this new way. As Google itself points out, not every search will trigger this new content, but if it does, the link will say "Google News Archive." Also, it is important to note that a lot of the historical material has been licensed from ProQuest and Heritage, which charge for access to their archives (unless you are, for example, on a college campus that subscribes to these services).

Over time, Google is planning to integrate these newspaper results into the main search results on Google.com, but for now Google is keeping the index of the News Archive separate from the main index.

After searching for a name, if Google News has a recent, relevant quote from that person it will display it in a box above the news results. Below is a screenshot of results when searching for "Tiger Woods."

Clicking on the name brings you to a page of quotations by that person. The Tiger Woods page is dominated by quotes about his performance at the Masters golf tournament last weekend and his unexpected knee surgery. Quotes can be ordered by date or relevance, and sorted by time (month, week, day, or hour), in much the same way as news results.

Users can then search in quotes to drill down to specific topics. For example, here is a page of quotes from US President George W. Bush about Iraq. Google News Quotes is smart enough to assign titles and nicknames to the correct people. A search for "George W. Bush" yields the same page of quotes as a search for "President Bush," for example.