In Google News, the first will be last

ONE INTERESTING feature of the Google news aggregation service is that if you're first with the news, you might find your story is last on the list, because of the way the beta service lists its results.

Google news tech uses computer algorithms to sort stories for its news site and in the section about how it works, which you can find here, the folks say you can find how a news story has developed by clicking the "sort by date" function.

The Sendo-Orange story we wrote last week is a good case in point. When you click on the Google listing of this story, you'll see the list of stories it holds. The last, by idg.net, is the first on the Si-Tech page.

But if you click on the second page at the bottom of this listing, you'll see Orange UK sued by Sendo, by The Inquirer, UK, was the first to break this story, way ahead of Reuters, ZD Net, the BBC, Computer World, the Other Plaice, Infoworld, and others.

Not that we're complaining. Far from it. It's great that Google is aggregating our news. It means that a small independent shop like us can compete successfully with the big big boys of this world.

You'll remember moroever.com tried to charge money to aggregate the INQ when we started up two years ago. It wanted so much money for that service it would have bust us before we'd kicked off. The entry of Google News into this market has given us a real lift.

But what the Google ranking does mean, is that if you time your story right - that is to say you delay it until the rest of the rat pack starts running, you're likely to get a much higher exposure on the news pages, just because you're late with the news. And because a lot of hacks are also gifted with low cunning, don't be surprised if they realise this already, and wait before spilling their pixels over the pages... µ

* WE HAVE AN RSS file which you can find at http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer.rss

See Also
Why we don't like Moreover
INQ discontented by aggravation
Newsnow gets a brand new look
It's time to ditch moreover.com