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Posted May 1, 2005.
Newsknife rates news sites on relevance (how),
based on our analysis of the main Google
News site.
Our count of the front page headlines at Google News puts the death
of Pope John Paul II and the election of Pope Benedict XVI as the
major news item during April.
We found The Kansas City Star four times for this story in first
place on the Google News home page, three times in fourth place,
once in fifth place, and 27 times on the first sub-page.
1 Kansas
City Star
4 0 0 3 1 0 0 27
2 ABC
News
4 1 0 1 0 1 3 20
3 Telegraph.co.uk
0 2 1 0 0 1 1 16
4 Reuters
5 Guardian
Unlimited, UK
6 Newsday
7 swissinfo, Switzerland
8 Voice
of America
9 International
Herald Tribune, France
10 The
New York Times
11 Special
Broadcasting Service, Australia
12 NPR
Hats off to The Kansas City Star. Their high positioning at Google
News has caused debate,
as have Xinhua, China's
high listings. The creator of Google News, Krishna Bharat, will
be a keynote speaker at the World
Editors Forum on May 30. We will be interested in any comments
he might make on how Google News decides news site and story relevance.
In the meantime four facts remain...
1. Google News says at the base of its home page that "the
selection and placement of stories on this page were determined
automatically by a computer program."
2. The selection and placement of any site in search results at
the main Google search engine can be influenced often dramatically
by that site employing search engine optimization (SEO) techniques.
3. The Google News computer program algorithm appears to like what
it finds at sites like The Kansas City Star.
4. It would be worthwhile then for any news site to do
a SEO review. Newsknife can help.
How we produced this ranking
Newsknife's ranked list of 126 news sites was produced from 4277
individual site listings for 15 news items related to the papal
succession.
The top 12 of the 126 sites are listed above. For the detailed
list of all 126 sites click at left to join Newsknife’s Members'
Area.
You can see the articles we monitored further down this page.
The sites were listed on the Google News home page and first sub-page
as sources.
Google News usually lists seven news sites per major news item
on their home page and thirty on each sub-page, all "sorted
by relevance". We award each site points per appearance on
a sliding scale from first to thirty-seventh position, and with
occasional tweaking we total the points to get the ranking positions.
Coverage by European and Arab news sites.
The New York Times reported that Arab news media focused on covering
Pope John Paul II's death to show their wide reach. European news
media might also have been expected to take particular interest
in this major event in their region.
Newsknife checked coverage by sites in these regions. We didn't
pick up much evidence that reportage by media there was relevant
enough to US audiences to make it across the Atlantic to the main
Google News site.
Here are our top 6 ranked European and Arab news sites for the
papal succession. The numbers after each site are the number of
appearances we recorded on the Google News home page, the first
sub-page and overall for the home page and up to 10 sub-pages of
listings for individual news items.
1 UK Guardian Unlimited
2 15 121
2 Switzerland swissinfo 1
19 98
3 UK Scotland on Sunday
1 11 81
4 UK BBC News 1 9 84
5 UK Telegraph.co.uk 5
16 62
6 France International Herald Tribune
1 12 61
We found only two sites at Google News from the countries with a
particular interest in the papal succession.
Poland Radio Polonia 0
0 2
Italy Corriere della Sera 0
0 2
You can see our top 25 ranked European and Arab news sites covering
the papal succession in Newsknife’s Members'
Area.
The news items we sampled
March 31, Pope has high fever
April 4, 2 million expected at funeral
April 4, Royal wedding postponed
April 4, 35,000 news stories on pope
April 5, 1+ million pilgrims file past
April 5, Ex-Presidents, Bush to go to funeral
April 6, Pilgrims turned away
April 7, Last to file past pope
April 12, Cardinals: beatification petition
April 13, Pre-conclave comment
April 17, Conclave to begin to elect pope
April 18, Conclave votes; no pope elected
April 20, US cardinals praise new pope
April 21, Reform remains pope's top priority
April 24, Benedict XVI installed as 265th Pope
Right now you can see the full list of top ranked news sites covering
the papal succession if you click at left to join Newsknife’s Members'
Area.
The 3-month Newsknife membership also lets you see for each news
site, in amazing detail, Newsknife's overall relevance rankings
for the year to date.
Visit Newsknife regularly. We rate the news sites.
Newsknife in-depth information tools:
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Copyright © 2005 Industry Standard Computing Ltd. All rights
reserved.
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