Google News Alerts - where's the RSS?
I continue to be a fan of most things Google (as I guess yesterday's post would probably indicate ;-), but the latest applet they've sneaked into beta seems a little half-baked.
Earlier this week they introduced Google News Alerts, a service that draws on the excellent Google News system (my default IE home page of choice). The point of the system is to send out "email when news articles appear online that match the topics you specify."
Nice thought, but a flawed implementation, I’m afraid.
As a PR bloke and a voracious consumer of news of many flavours and sources, I think I'm as close as you're likely to get to the perfect target demographic for an application like this. So I think I’m reasonably well qualified to assess the usefulness of this new tool.
I’m already subscribed to a number of different news alert services, similar to this one. Most of them leave...er...let’s say: “room for improvement”. But Google’s effort is particularly disappointing, falling way below expectations for such a smart R&D company.
First of all, the process to set up alerts is opaque, to say the least. On the one hand, it couldn’t be simpler: give it a keyword, a delivery frequency, and an email address – click “Create News Alert”, and Bingo!
Humpf.
Each time you enter one of these things, you’re going to get an email message to confirm that you really meant to set it up. If you’re like me, you probably have at least twenty or so clients, competitors, and general news topics you’re tracking at any one time. You have to go through the exact same process of setting up each alert one at a time. And how do you modify or tune an alert after you've set it up? The serial, manual nature of this process is just dim.
It also relies on the user to be able to specify decent search strings for the stuff they’re interested in. Problem is, other than the obvious client names and industry sectors you know you want to watch, most people don’t know what they’re interested in until it pops up.
They can tell you the general areas of interest, perhaps – but not the specifics. And there can be no guarantee that the specific news you need to know will be “labeled” in such a way that the keyword/s you enter will cause the relevant information to be found. Unfortunately, the information that really matters to you probably doesn't come with a big red meta tag that is an exact match with one of your declared interests.
To quote from some long ago work with David Weinberger:
To know if something matters to you, we have to know not only what it is about, but also what interests you. How can you tell what interests someone? Here are two obvious ways. Neither is much good.
1. You could show them everything and ask them if they’re interested in it.
This technique is known as The Incredibly Stupid and Annoying Technique. It is the problem, not a solution.
2. You could ask the person to tell you what interests him or her.
You will end up with a list of 5-10 items of such broad generality that they are of little use. Try it on yourself. Here’s the sort of list you’ll get:
Things I'm Interested In:
My Kids.
Baseball.
Meryl Streep movies.
My stock prices.
Politics.
Airplane construction techniques
(The exact order will depend on who has requested the list.)
This list misses the fact that you are quite interested in:
- The manufacturer who has patented a new gluing technique that may turn out to replace rivets.
- The future competitor founded in a garage last week.
- The new president of Outer Slobonia who wants to nationalize one of your key suppliers.
- The new research showing that the staples your product uses have unusual magnetic properties
- The traffic jam that has developed on your route home.
So asking someone what news they’re interested in like this is not a good way to serve up the information they’re really going to want.
There is a better way, though. I wonder why they’re not tapping into the existing categories of news they’ve already established for the main Google News site?
This would certainly make it easier for them to filter based on some higher level clues. Being interested in AOL Time Warner from an entertainment industry perspective, for example, is not the same as being interested in them from a shareholder’s perspective.
As Google is already clustering news into a list of top level categories – why no drop down list on the News Alerts page?
I could go on. Oh, I guess I already did. But there’s an even bigger bone to pick.
I like the idea of what Google is doing, but why the heck don’t they just set up an RSS feed for all the categories on the main Google News page? Why reinvent the wheel?
Using RSS would be simpler, more open, offer deeper coverage, and be easier to maintain.
I already get most of the news I need through RSS feeds directly into my NewzCrawler. Lovely, intuitive interface. Fast, easy, efficient. Give me Google News in RSS and I’ll be a very happy flack.
Alternatively, if they insist on using email, someone at Google Labs should take a close look at what the SonicBoomerang guys are doing. The daily feed I get from my SonicBoomerang “assistant” is the first emails I open every morning, and often the most useful. Heck, maybe Google should just buy SonicBoomerang – if Justin’s ready and willing to sell, of course...
Earlier this week they introduced Google News Alerts, a service that draws on the excellent Google News system (my default IE home page of choice). The point of the system is to send out "email when news articles appear online that match the topics you specify."
Nice thought, but a flawed implementation, I’m afraid.
As a PR bloke and a voracious consumer of news of many flavours and sources, I think I'm as close as you're likely to get to the perfect target demographic for an application like this. So I think I’m reasonably well qualified to assess the usefulness of this new tool.
I’m already subscribed to a number of different news alert services, similar to this one. Most of them leave...er...let’s say: “room for improvement”. But Google’s effort is particularly disappointing, falling way below expectations for such a smart R&D company.
First of all, the process to set up alerts is opaque, to say the least. On the one hand, it couldn’t be simpler: give it a keyword, a delivery frequency, and an email address – click “Create News Alert”, and Bingo!
Humpf.
Each time you enter one of these things, you’re going to get an email message to confirm that you really meant to set it up. If you’re like me, you probably have at least twenty or so clients, competitors, and general news topics you’re tracking at any one time. You have to go through the exact same process of setting up each alert one at a time. And how do you modify or tune an alert after you've set it up? The serial, manual nature of this process is just dim.
It also relies on the user to be able to specify decent search strings for the stuff they’re interested in. Problem is, other than the obvious client names and industry sectors you know you want to watch, most people don’t know what they’re interested in until it pops up.
They can tell you the general areas of interest, perhaps – but not the specifics. And there can be no guarantee that the specific news you need to know will be “labeled” in such a way that the keyword/s you enter will cause the relevant information to be found. Unfortunately, the information that really matters to you probably doesn't come with a big red meta tag that is an exact match with one of your declared interests.
To quote from some long ago work with David Weinberger:
To know if something matters to you, we have to know not only what it is about, but also what interests you. How can you tell what interests someone? Here are two obvious ways. Neither is much good.
1. You could show them everything and ask them if they’re interested in it.
This technique is known as The Incredibly Stupid and Annoying Technique. It is the problem, not a solution.
2. You could ask the person to tell you what interests him or her.
You will end up with a list of 5-10 items of such broad generality that they are of little use. Try it on yourself. Here’s the sort of list you’ll get:
Things I'm Interested In:
My Kids.
Baseball.
Meryl Streep movies.
My stock prices.
Politics.
Airplane construction techniques
(The exact order will depend on who has requested the list.)
This list misses the fact that you are quite interested in:
- The manufacturer who has patented a new gluing technique that may turn out to replace rivets.
- The future competitor founded in a garage last week.
- The new president of Outer Slobonia who wants to nationalize one of your key suppliers.
- The new research showing that the staples your product uses have unusual magnetic properties
- The traffic jam that has developed on your route home.
So asking someone what news they’re interested in like this is not a good way to serve up the information they’re really going to want.
There is a better way, though. I wonder why they’re not tapping into the existing categories of news they’ve already established for the main Google News site?
This would certainly make it easier for them to filter based on some higher level clues. Being interested in AOL Time Warner from an entertainment industry perspective, for example, is not the same as being interested in them from a shareholder’s perspective.
As Google is already clustering news into a list of top level categories – why no drop down list on the News Alerts page?
I could go on. Oh, I guess I already did. But there’s an even bigger bone to pick.
I like the idea of what Google is doing, but why the heck don’t they just set up an RSS feed for all the categories on the main Google News page? Why reinvent the wheel?
Using RSS would be simpler, more open, offer deeper coverage, and be easier to maintain.
I already get most of the news I need through RSS feeds directly into my NewzCrawler. Lovely, intuitive interface. Fast, easy, efficient. Give me Google News in RSS and I’ll be a very happy flack.
Alternatively, if they insist on using email, someone at Google Labs should take a close look at what the SonicBoomerang guys are doing. The daily feed I get from my SonicBoomerang “assistant” is the first emails I open every morning, and often the most useful. Heck, maybe Google should just buy SonicBoomerang – if Justin’s ready and willing to sell, of course...
