Associated Press to launch news aggregator

The Internet is the final frontier of complete free speech, and information. It is through the Internet that a person can acquire information about anything they choose and have access to blogs, news stories and pictures. One of the most popular search engines that web surfers use is Google. There is an abundance of Web sites that link you to whatever you are searching. Sounds easy enough, right? But as always, there’s a downside. Google leads you to bogus headlines or other inaccurate sources that try to disguise themselves as news. This can be especially frustrating for those searching for news articles. The future of journalism is on the Internet as print media outlets are slowly dying. Knowing this, something needs to be done about how news articles are filtered through the search aggregators that lead people to links by popular hits and not by accuracy.
The Associated Press has come to the rescue with their plan to out-Google Google. To compete with what they deem as the misappropriation of news, the AP is firing back with its own version of a news aggregator. They want to build an online destination where AP hopes web users will easily find and read stories of those of other content creators. This would create a landing page, which would host articles from news sources that would allow headlines on the page. The good news for the participating outlets is sharing ad revenue generated by the advertisements posted on those pages. The site would give citizens starving for factual news access to accurate stories from national and local media outlets. The AP wants to re-establish a balance of power between search engine company and content creators. It would be a new model to benefit publishers. AP also wants to keep their content separate from Google’s pages by using something called the “robots exclusion protocol,” which blocks Google News and others from indexing the content in the first place. The challenge would be how AP and other news outlets will lure readers who have grown accustomed to searching on Google and other aggregators. There is a fear that readers will be alienated because they are used to searching the web any way that they chose.
It would be a daunting task to compete with Google not only because of the amount of revenue it rakes in annually, but also how much power it has in the World Wide Web. Google has monopolized all other search engines. This becomes beyond obvious when people say they are going to “Google” something, rather than say they are going to look it up on the computer. But if the AP is successful in creating a search aggregator specifically geared toward news, it would be a great way to help keep newspapers alive through the economic downturn.  Sharing the ad revenue with the content providers will help being money back to the sites where the articles originated, most likely a newspaper or broadcast Web site, rather than a blog or Wikipedia, where fact checking is a foreign concept. Because Google brings up sites by number of hits, it doesn’t direct users to the legitimate sources if they have not been searched enough to beat a blog that touches upon the same subject. When users “Google” a topic, they are forced to filter through endless pages of content and fluff before you can find a web address with The New York Times or ABC in it.
The way the Internet is set up now, there is too much possibility for false information to be put up. By blocking unauthorized users from posting things on the AP aggregators, the chance for someone to copy, paste and re-post a story with added information which may or may not be true is gone. There will also be no chance of getting to blogs that may be more opinionated or just posted made up stories that satire what is going on in the real world. This new way of searching will be beneficial to those who prefer getting their news online.
The Internet controls a lot of what people do and society adapts to the way the Internet allows us to do things. The AP’s new search aggregator would be a medium controlling the Internet to its advantage and benefiting from it. This can lead to different style search engines opening up for other specific things. Maybe the fashion, music and entertainment industries will create a new way of searching that is unique to them. Even though the idea is a good start, the AP will have to work quickly with intelligent developers because Google is already refining their searches. The image search on Google now allows you to filter by color and faces to name a few things. The competition between the two companies will be beneficial, but it is all up to the readers themselves to determine if one entity is more successful than the other. If a reader is searching for legitimate content, they will find the AP news aggregator a favorite tool in their daily search for news.
 

1 comments

will dodder

Thu Apr 16 2009 06:46

And that is exactly as it should be. The AP should compete by innovation, not by litigation.

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