July 11th, 2005

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Internet
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What Does Google News Grab From My Daily Paper?

On Friday, we were pleased to get a nice big profile of one of our local clients in the Vancouver Sun. As these things sometimes do, the article also resulted in a radio interview on CKNW.

Unfortunately, when I do a Google News search for the company’s CEO (a fairly unique string from the article), I come up empty. Why hasn’t Google News indexed this article?

The Sun has a seven days-free then subscriber-only rule for most articles, but this one will apparently be available forever (or so an insider tells me). I know for a fact that Google News spiders the subscription-only stories–why haven’t they spidered this one? Is Canada.com’s site not enabling the Google spider to find all the stories?

Comments: 3 Responses so far

Andrea
July 11th, 2005
11:47 pm

I’ve noticed before that you can’t even turn up Sun and Canada.com articles through a search of those media outlets’ own sites. Try looking up Strigel on the page you provided. Nada. I’ve been thinking for a while that they block certain pages and articles from the search engine. I think this is so they can sell archives or something.

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Melba
July 12th, 2005
8:25 am

Same thing happens for me with the Globe and Mail. Mentions in the Globe never seem to turn up in my Google News.

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bree
July 15th, 2005
5:39 pm

It’s not as simple as ’seven days and then subscriber’ - even subscribers don’t get online access after seven days. It will be available forever from Infomart, which is the paid archive service.

That said, as far as I know it’s not a deliberate attempt to prevent Google from indexing those articles.

The internal site search is awful. Again, that’s not some nefarious plan, it’s just plain bad. I believe there is a plan in place to fix that, however I won’t be holding my breath.

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