5 ms·
"Traffic of news sites depends heavily on Google." It seems counterintuitive to me, at least for my use case. I rarely search for "news", I have a handful of
by Kurtz79 8y ago
"Traffic of news sites depends heavily on Google."
It seems counterintuitive to me, at least for my use case.
I rarely search for "news", I have a handful of websites to which I usually go to for them.
I might search the name in Google if for whatever reason it doesn't show on the top results when I start typing the name on the search bar, because I'm too lazy to use bookmarks.
Do most other people use aggregators or "search" for news?
- ocdtrekkie 8y agoI'm pretty reliant on an RSS reader. I rarely use Bing News/Google News/etc. unless I'm curious about a breaking story that isn't covered in my subscribed feeds (which are mostly tech news.) The other place I end up picking up a lot of news is Twitter, and of course, here on HN.
- onion2k 8y agoNew traffic (aka growth) often comes from Google, and without growth every site will slowly die.
- Aunche 8y agoPeople Google the news when there's a major event going on that they want to know more about but don't usually read the news. For example, I did so to find out the 2018 US midterm results.
- buboard 8y agoif you re searching for (or something) someone public you re likely to encounter news articles about them, many of them, and you usually read multiple to find what u re looking for. That creates a lot of traffic.
- vorpalhex 8y agoYes, I use aggregators so I don't fall victim (as easily) to echochambers of my own design. All sources are biased, but at least you can hopefully get some idea of the truth by reading differently biased sources.
- eiaoa 8y ago> Yes, I use aggregators so I don't fall victim (as easily) to echochambers of my own design. All sources are biased, but at least you can hopefully get some idea of the truth by reading differently biased sources. I'm not sure if that makes sense as a strategy. By relying on aggregators (that aren't human curated like Apple News), you're just getting the sources that do the best SEO. If your aggregator does algorithmic curation, they'll build an echo chamber for you. I think if you want to avoid falling into an echo chamber, it's best to identify a couple of high-quality news sources with different perspectives, and read them unselectively. Say two national newspapers with different political orientations, an international newspaper, and a local newspaper.
- thanosnose 8y agoThat used to be a good idea 4 or 5 years ago. Sadly now aggregators are echo chambers themselves due to publisher pressure.
- tomjen3 8y agoI don't search for news in the general term, but sometimes when you google famous people news articles are among the results. Those could also be, say, an earth quake in tahity when you google tahity.
- sarcasmic 8y agoSome people use aggregators on purpose, because it gives them a broad-spectrum view. Some use aggregators unintentionally, considering Google-searching text boxes have replaced URL bars in all major browsers and platforms over the last decade.
- majani 8y agoMost people settle on a few trusted sources... after starting on Google and finding good info constantly from that source.