Google News: Rise of the Aggregator

Since its beta launch in 2002, the Google News aggregator has become one of its company’s most successful innovations. In the process, and perhaps inadvertently, it started making headlines of its own. Most famously, NewsCorp’s Rupert Murdoch complained that Google is just plain stealing his content and threatened last November to make it invisible to their search crawlers. Others, too, have accused Google of violating its motto, “Don’t be evil” (and not just in the news domain, either). In his Big Think interview this week, Josh Cohen, Senior Business Product Manager for Google News, responds.

Cohen deflates talk of a coming “index war” in which Google, Bing, and other search engines compete for the right to index major media content. Advising that uniqueness of user experience is crucial to new-media success, he predicts that Murdoch and other old-media giants will be able to repackage their content successfully–but warns that there is “no silver bullet” that will make it happen.

Cohen rounds out the discussion with a brief history of Google News’s rise and a preview of the hottest new ideas emerging from the company as a whole.