Google Admits Twitter is Kicking its Butt in News
The Twittersphere should collectively hoist a giant glass of champagne to itself, since it is rare for one of Google’s co-founders to come down from their elaborate private jets and admit somebody else is doing something better than they are — in fact much better.
But that is what happened this week at Google’s Zeitgeist conference: “People really want to do stuff real time and I think they [Twitter] have done a great job about it,” Larry Page said in his closing address . “I think we have done a relatively poor job of creating things that work on a per-second basis.”
Google News, in particular, is one of the slowest news and information sites on the web. That’s because its algorithms require that any given article receive a high enough search ranking based on links to it before it can be displayed. By then, however — as any journalist could explain to the Google — if the search firm were inclined to listen, which it is not — what GN considers “news” isn’t. It’s old news.
Yahoo, by contrast, employs human beings with the judgement to recognize news in real time, and therefore is far more on top of what matters than is GN.
In any event,Twitter is the best news headline channel of them all, as we have been documenting for months now. It’s already bigger than The New York Times. It’ll soon be bigger than CNN. And now, in Page’s own view, it’s bigger, at least in this one very important way, than the biggest fish of them all — Google.
(Thanks to Thierry Lamouline for pointing me to Page’s remarks.)
In addition to serving as a BNET Media analyst/blogger, David Weir is a veteran journalist and the author of several books. Weir is a co-founder and vice-president of the Center for Investigative Reporting, as well as an editorial board member of The Nation.
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