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Posted May 1, 2004.
(Updated ratings are available in the Members'
Area.)
Newsknife rates news sites on relevance, (how).
According to our research, the sites at the top of our rankings are highly relevant to news fans at the
moment as timely, credible sources for major news stories.
This month Newsknife’s relevance rating is “the front page sites”. To produce it we visited
Google News many times and noted the news sites that were
listed on its home page as sources for major news items.
Think of the publicity value if your (favorite) news site was one of that lucky group. Think of the
exposure to Google’s huge user base. Think of the positive effect on your site’s reputation for quality,
(Google News listings for each news item are “sorted by relevance”. That sounds like “quality” to us.)
On the Google News home page we looked at the Top Two stories, the three top World stories and the three
Top US stories. Google News listed seven news sites on its home page for each of these stories.
Here are the Top 6-ranked “front page” sites from our sample. (For the detailed list of our 416
“front page” news sites click at left to join Newsknife’s Members’ Area.)
Place 1 2 3
4 5 6 7
1 The
New York Times
44 12 24 24 23 16 9
2 The
Washington Post
34 16 18 9 22 14 13
3 Reuters
27 15 22 21 14 15 9
4 ABC News
19 11 17 15 14 8 3
5 Voice of America
20 6 6 12 8 7 14
6 CNN
12 7 14 14 4 16 8
The above list is explained in two parts.
First is the number of appearances for each site in positions 1
to 7. The New York Times, for example, appeared as the first source
for a Google News story 44 times during our visits to Google News,
as the second source 12 times; and so on through to 9 times as the
seventh listed source.
Second is our ranking method. Why for example, have we ranked ABC News higher than Voice of America?
When ranking, we’ve rewarded quality and quantity. Every time a
site appeared as the first source we gave it 7 points, 6 points
for second place and so on down to 1 point for seventh place. Then
with a little tweaking, we ranked the sites on their total scores.
We think our method is fair, but that’s only our opinion. If you
think there’s a fairer method of ranking Google News appearances
use the form at the bottom of this page to tell us about it.
Google News as a barometer
Google is highly successful at determining what web users want. Newsknife believes that Google News’
listings “sorted by relevance”, are a good barometer of how well a news site is serving the general public.
If a news site does well in Google News rankings chances are it will do well outside of Google News.
Details of our sample
Newsknife’s “front page sites” list from which the above six rankings
were taken, was produced from our visits to the main Google News
http://news.google.com
site during December 2003 – April 2004. We recorded a maximum of
300 sources for each of 372 news items. In all, we recorded 68,309
individual site listings by 1490 sites. Of these sites, 416 appeared
on the home page of Google News at least once as a source for a
major news item.
Is your (favorite) news site amongst them? Click the PayPal button
at left to join our Members’ Area and see the full details.
To find the most relevant news sites visit Newsknife regularly. We rate the news sites.
Google statements on Google News relevance:
Newsknife in-depth information tools:
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