In a Q&A with Google's CEO Eric Schmidt, a newspaper exec asked the following question:
Question: -- Is there a way to look at search and when you search on a particular topic, that news organizations with credible brands, that somehow the algorithm could be tweaked to reflect that, not only for the benefit of the publishers, but for the users?
Kind of schizophrenic, isn't it? At one moment demanding money for being indexed, the next begging for better placement.
Still, talk about arrogance, the notion that because of their long-established brand, that Google should bump off other worthy search results to give the newspapers top priority. If I search "Iraq WMD", should we get Judith Miller's pieces from the NY Times at the top of the search results? Because as we've learned about the news biz -- they're not exactly good at rewarding success. Otherwise, the likes of Kristol, Friedman, and Broder would've been fired long ago, not promoted and venerated.
Google has risen to its lofty heights PRECISELY because it has democratized search results. It's algorithms gives preference to sources that have received lots of links from other sources. The more popular and linked a source is, and the higher the quality of those sources linking to it, the more likely it is to reach the top of the Google search results. The (webby) masses make the call on credibility, not suits at Google HQ. And while people occasionally figure out how to game the results, Google constantly tweaks the algorithms toward that democratic ideal. As Schmidt responded:
The usual problem is you've got somebody who really is very trustworthy but they're not as well-known and they compete against people who are better known, and they don't, in their view, get high enough ranking. We have not come up with a way to algorithmically handle that in a coherent way.
Get that? The problem isn't that "well-respected brands" don't get to the top of the listings, it's that trustworthy but known sources are not. THAT is the web ideal, a meritocratic world where what matters is the quality of the content, not the institution you work for.
But don't expect anything resembling that from those assholes who have driven the newspaper industry into the gutter.
Update: More media exec arrogance. Stuff like:
“News consumption depends on news production, and I don't see anything on the Internet that produces news—that is, detailed responsible empirical journalism—the way newspapers do (or did). It is typical of Americans to get more excited about consumption than about production.”
If you're in such a bubble that you haven't seen the dozens of news operations online that are producing "detailed responsible empirical journalism", then you are hopeless. Their biggest problem? They continue to act as though their medium is inherently superior when news is medium agnostic.
(p.s. In the link above, I'm one of those quoted media insiders. Can you guess which quote is mine?)
Update II: You were right if you guessed:
"You abandon the conceit that ‘newspapers’ equals ‘news,’ you realize that people have far more information available to them about current events than ever before, and that’s a great thing for both journalism (the gathering of news) and the public."
