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Sites that require registration to be read (NY Times, Salon as two quick examples) are not doing so well when it comes to web searches.
...[R]ecently, when I googled the terms "Iraq torture prison Abu Ghraib" -- certainly one of the most intensively covered news stories of the year -- the first New York Times article was the 295th search result, trailing the New Yorker, Guardian, ABC and CBS News, New York Post, MSNBC, Slate, CNN, Sydney Morning Herald, Denver Post, USA Today, Bill O'Reilly on FoxNews and a host of others news sites.
What's more, tons of other non-traditional news sources came ahead of the Times, including a number of blogs and low-budget rabble-rousers like Antiwar.com, CounterPunch, truthout and Beliefnet (a site dedicated to spirituality). So did Al-Jazeera (twice). But the Times still ranked low, even after it plastered an Abu Ghraib story on its front page for 32 straight days between May and June. And Google isn't the only one to shun the Times: I got similar results from other search engines (AltaVista, Lycos, Yahoo).
I wonder if they'll drop the registration requirements. I doubt it; they seem to perceive an economic benefit to having people register. Either they expect to make money off subscriptions (The Wall Street Journal does this successfully, Salon is failing quite miserably), or they think the gained demographic information for marketing purposes is valuable (although I would suspect that a majority of their data is spoofed and flawed -- I know that I don't give out real information).
Posted by Casper at July 15, 2004 12:06 PM