Comments | agrumer: The long, slow death of The NY Times

agrumer

The long, slow death of The NY Times

Dec 16, 2005 22:44

NY Times, “Time Warner Plans to Sell 5% of AOL to Google”:
Finally, around 9 p.m., Richard D. Parsons, chief executive of Time Warner told Eric E. Schmidt, chief executive of Google, that he would accept Google’s recently sweetened offer. Google, which prides itself on the purity of its search results, agreed to give favored placement to content ( Read more... )

news, google

Comments 5

dsgood December 17 2005, 04:35:03 UTC

I stopped relying on the NYTimes when they ran an article about how the New York City dialect was dying out. Every expert they quoted clearly said that the New York City Metropolitan Area Dialect was changing rather than dying.

The paper I've found most reliable (by the standard of having fewest errors in areas where I'm knowledgeable) is USA Today.

dotsomething December 17 2005, 15:08:32 UTC

That's alarming (thank goodness I don't read the NY Times anymore).

I'm not sure the NYT is so offbase cheshyre December 17 2005, 19:27:13 UTC

My company was in talks with Google over a special deal. Trying to figure out how much is nonconfidential.

If you do a Google search on bush, above the results will be a "News results for bush" taking you to Google News. If you Google on "saturn photos", the first few pics from Google Images appear... above the search results

They were offering such placement to our company, and I'll bet that's what AOL could get as well. Not ads on the side like Google currently has, but putting hits to AOL content above the search results.

Re: I'm not sure the NYT is so offbase agrumer December 18 2005, 01:03:53 UTC

Wait, were they offering special placement, ahead of the other sources listed in Google News? Or were they just offering the opportunity to be listed as a source in Google News?

Re: I'm not sure the NYT is so offbase cheshyre December 18 2005, 18:23:00 UTC

That OneBox is a special field that appears above the results in standard Google searches. Right now you see it on certain queries (like I demonstrated) where the OneBox content offers to take you to Google Images or Google News. And notice that appears before any results from the main Google index?

That's what they were offering our company. We're a database aggregator: licensed articles from magazines and scholarly journals. Putting results from our content in that spot above the rest of the results. [I don't yet know the status of negotiations]

That's what I suspect they might've been offering AOL/Time-Warner. That placement.

PS: do NOT credit me by name or handle. I don't want any risk that even pseudonymously this could be traced back to my employer.