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Posted July 6, 2006.
Newsknife rates news sites on relevance (how),
based on our analysis of the main Google
News site.
Read more here about our current ratings. For just $US10 join the
Newsknife Members' Area
now and see full detailed lists. Click at left to join.
These ratings are based on our sample of 280,276 individual site
listings at Google News by 3805 sites for 896 news items, year to
date 2006.
Midyear special rating:
news site performance trends at Google News over the last 12 months
Every year around now, Newsknife produces a special "overview"
rating. This time we've produced a list of news sites where our
figures for appearances at Google News over the last 12 months trend
up or down.
Our trend measurement for each site is whether the appearances
that Newsknife found on the home page of Google News were up or
down over the last 3 months compared with the previous months. (See
method details below.)
You can see the full list of site trends now in Newsknife's Members'
Area. To join click at left on this page.
The following list of 6 sites is a ranked sample from those that
trended upwards. We've showcased them because they are long term
good performers. We think, therefore, that their improvement is
probably more significant than for news sites that have suddenly
- and perhaps temporarily - starred.
1 TIME
2 New York Daily News, NY
3 CBC, Canada
4 Seattle Post Intelligencer, WA
5 Monsters and Critics, UK
6 Jerusalem Post, Israel
Click here for a larger
page format showing all the information...
TIME is the most interesting performer. Newsknife found it an average
10% more often on Google News home page March - April 2006 than
between July 2005 - February 2006.
July 2005 - February 2006 we found TIME an average 27 times each
month on all pages including an average 3 times on the home page.
March - April 2006 hiked to an average 58 over all pages including
an average 12 on the home page.
Is there a reason for this improvement that you can learn from?
We think that TIME magazine seems to be promoting the TIME website
more over recent months. This may indicate improvements at the site
that Google has responded to. However, looking at these two TIME
items we can't spot any structural difference in the more recent
item. Both were top ranked appearances at Google News.
November 2005
How
to Stay on Script in South Korea
May 2006
Behind
Brazil's Killing Spree
Finally, a brief mention of sites where we found a downward trend
in our figures, (see the full picture in the Newsknife Members'
Area). Quite a number of major sites had just a sliver off
their performance in our figures. It was all within the margin of
error and amounting to nothing - except that we also found a number
of minor sites with a recent boost in numbers.
Perhaps, as Google News settles in it is shifting its criteria
to increasingly make good the claim by Krishna Bharat, Google Principal
Scientist, "We try to be as comprehensive as possible and use
a mix of techniques to find sources to ensure that multiple perspectives
are available on any given news story."
Maybe this means more minor news sites at Google News and less
from major news sites.
Trend rating method
Newsknife monitors news site appearances at Google News not just
on its home page but 10 sub-pages deep for each news item.
To produce this Newsknife trend rating for the last 12 months,
first for each site for each month we noted the % of the total appearances
found that were on the Google News home page.
Next we averaged those monthly % in two groups, July 2005 - February
2006, and the latter part of the 12 month range, March - May 2006.
Then we compared these averaged % to see whether the site had trended
up or down in the last 3 months (examples...).
We stress that Newsknife News Site Relevance Rankings are our own
relevance rankings, not Google's. They are based on our judgment
and our analysis of the listings we recorded when monitoring Google
News.
Visit Newsknife regularly to discover the most relevant news sites
for news of the moment. The 3-month Newsknife Members'
Area membership lets you also see the ratings for each site
in amazing detail.
Suggestions and comments?
Newsknife: we rate the news sites.
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