Monthly Archives: August 2004

All the News that is Fit to Google

This entry was posted in Google Information Journalism on by

It’s not clear why Vin Cosbie is surprised about this:

But when I analyzed its choices of news sources, I was surprised by the results. Although Google spiders more than 7,000 news sources, only about a dozen sources account for the vast majority of stories displayed on Google News day to day, and two of those predominant sources are owned and operated by the U.S. and Chinese governments.
A commentor hits main point number 1: real estate. There is only so much space on a web page.
A second reason is that not all 7000 sources are going to be interested in every story and many that might be will not write about it as they have made other choices.
I suspect that these dozen or so sources are, in fact, the sources that rank highest in Google’s ranking methodology. This may be a self reinforcing result since most of us probably read and, if applicable, link only the first story or two thus strengthening rank for those sources. On a statistically meaningless note I have many times gone deeper into the source material and quickly tired of the repetitive and derivative articles.
Vin can do this as well. By doing just a bit more work he can click on Google New’s always available “and xxx related” link and find the dozens, hundreds or thousands of other sources that he was originally looking for.
Via E-Media Tidbits.

July’s Top Referrers

This entry was posted in Modulator on by

On the right side bar is the updated roll of Modulator’s 20 top referrers for the month of July. Number 20 produced 12 referrals compared to 10 for number 20 in June.
Overall traffic was up about 2.4% from June and up 233% from July 03 (no I do not expect the year to year growth rate to continue at that rate). I am also seeing an increasing number of visits from folks who have bookmarked Modulator and I thank all of you for visiting!
Statistics are culled from AWStats running on Modulator’s server at Hosting Matters.
July churn: 8 blogs dropped and 7 new ones added compared to 10 and 8 in June.
Top search word: extended
Most popular post: ROTK: Extended Edition
Again, thank you one and all!
Also, I’d like to acknowledge significant referrals from some of the blogosphere’s ‘service’ sites: Technorati, weblogs.com, blogrolling.com, MovableType, Blogdex, Bloglines, blogoshpere.us, Sitemeter, NZ Bear’s Ecosystem, Bloogz and Daypop.
All of the blog rolls except the Base Roll are ordered by most recently updated so be sure to ping weblogs.com or blogrolling.com to push to the top of the rolls. These are certainly the sites I tend to look at first and visitors will see you at the top of the roll as well.
For a brief discussion of Modulator’s blog rolls look here.