Content Matters

Last week, Google integrated its Blog Search results into Google News, providing users with a comprehensive view of both “traditional” news and blog posts for their searches. 

Yesterday, in a related move, they added Blog results to Google Alerts.  As shown, you can now set an alert to be "comprehensive" (news, blogs, web and groups) or select an individual type.  The default is comprehensive.  For those of us who track news from various sources, including blogs, this is a huge convenience.  More importantly, these two changes will begin to expose blog posts to many more users who don’t regularly follow blogs.

Today, about half the Content Matters traffic comes via Google web search (the rest is a mix of RSS readers and specialized blog search via Technorati, Google and others).  This web search traffic consists of users who are not specifically seeking out blogs.  Integration of blogs with Google News and Alerts should provide similar exposure to users of online news.

As TechCrunch points out, Yahoo last month reversed course, pulling blog content out of its news results temporarily, as they rework the results.  I expect that we’ll see an integrated view from Yahoo again in the near future.

As content from various sources begins to be included in the “news” bucket and as traditional news is disseminated through more diverse platforms, we will continue to see erosion of the traditional destination news sites.  That’s why the next ten years will bring even more rapid change than the past ten to the news industry.