Much ado about nothing..

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

Much is being made, and said, about this news item. Seems that Google is going to start including press releases from corporations or lobbying groups in it’s Google News searches. My response? They always have been, indirectly.

I work for an organization that puts out quite a few press releases during the course of the year, and we have a number of member organizations that also put out their own press releases throughout the year. If you ever have access to both the original press release and the “news” articles that are put out based on the press releases, you’d be amazed at the amount of copy/pasting that goes into those “news” articles directly from the press releases.

For my money, if Google News wants to add press releases to their search results, it actually makes the news MORE transparent because if you get a search result that takes you to a company’s press release you know it’s a press release as opposed to some “legitimate news source” that simply copied the press release and passed it off as “news”

Of course there’s always the possibility that news search results will get lost in a sea of press releases, but I have my doubts about that happening.

Share with your friends!
LinkedInBlueskyMastodonThreadsRedditBuffer

Similar Posts

  • One of those days

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

    I had hoped the short week due to Thanksgiving would be a relatively quiet one, but today definitely did not fit into that plan. One of our servers crashed early this morning, creating all kinds of havoc around the helpdesk, and the day pretty much went downhill from there. It was one of those days…

  • Thank you!

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

    Given the date, and also considering my promise to not make myself part of the remembrances, I still feel the need to say something. No, not about Sept. 11, or anything like that, because those thoughts are private, and personal. But to take a moment, as we all should this day, to appreciate all the…

  • Trying to Game Google and Facebook Truth Algorithms

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

    I’ve been suspicious of Twitter and Facebook’s attempts at letting users decide what is “true” and hiding the posts that get voted down, let alone Google’s suggestion that they will start doing something similar with search results. My fear is simply that a large group will target things they happen to not agree with to…

  • Call me Mr. On-Call

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    I know, I know. I promised you more details on the various tools I used trying to clean up that trojan/spyware infection last week, but wouldn’t you know if, I had yet another friend with computer problems. I made a quick house call after work on Friday to discover the reason that her wireless mouse/keyboard…

  • Dell update

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

    I checked the Dell site last night to see how the production of my Axim X5 was going only to discover that they had shipped it on Monday, and that it had arrived at the UPS distribution center in Columbus yesterday evening. So it’s on schedule for delivery this morning! Now I’m thinking that my…

  • More with the nastiness

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

    As if to prove that it’s not just women being publicly slammed that gets my dander up, I agree with Roger’s comment here. So you dropped Scoble’s feed from your subscriptions. I do that all the time. Heck I drop people from the blogroll, or just quit reading blogs all the time because I’m not…

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

To respond on your own website, enter the URL of your response which should contain a link to this post's permalink URL. Your response will then appear (possibly after moderation) on this page. Want to update or remove your response? Update or delete your post and re-enter your post's URL again. (Find out more about Webmentions.)