Another reason Google beats Newspapers…

When talking about why Social Media and web1.0, never mind 2.0, are not a fad and here to stay (this is Scotland: you’d be surprised at how many companies here are grudging towards email, never mind websites) one of the things I try to impress to people is that when people want information, they don’t look for it via the Daily Record or The Sun sites (or the specific paper that they read) more often than not they go through the main Google page.

But it wasn’t until today that – apart from the convenience of the Google homepage – a reason struck me for this: a lot of papers have crap search engines for finding information.

I was looking for a couple of articles that I knew had appeared in certain publications, so off I went to the newspaper sites and typed in key phrases that I knew appeared in the articles.

Didn’t get what I wanted back. Wasn’t even a case of it wasn’t on the first page of search results, it wasn’t there at all.

So goes off to Google, types in the same keywords along with publication title and guess what? Articles that I wanted appeared right away.

And it struck me that this is another reason people are losing faith with papers – and speaking to a few people since it seems to be the case – that people get frustrated with things like this and it puts them off the paper. Even online.

(The other thing that seems to be put people off online papers is the fact that there’s more content in print. Where’s all the NIBs for example?)

Anyway, just a thought that perhaps web editors should look at their archives and search engines (ie, the past) as well as their current and future content in the battle to retain readers.

(this all popped into mind as well after reading the story about Google doing more archives of papers. I hope they get round to the old New York Sun and Francis P Church editorials at some point.)