Advocating blogs back in 2002, Dave Winer reportedly made a bet about blog entries appearing higher in SERP's than New York Times articles on the top news stories of 2007. Labels: blogs, newspapers
This account suggests he only narrowly won. (The author also says that trusted journalists have been displaced in the SERP's by "nameless, faceless amateurs who don't have to prove their expertise." I say BS to that claim, given that plenty of media stories show up along with thoughtful, useful blog posts.)
But the old search engine trick is in play here, isn't it? What queries are chosen to be the objects of study?
"Mortgage crisis" was one of the top five, and without even looking at official journos' lists, that was the number one story I could think of for the year.
But the query I used to search on it - subprime fallout - wasn't the "official" one. On the subprime fallout query, I discovered that Winer was very right! Blog entries took the #1 and #5 spots, with Econbrowser showing up first and Seeking Alpha at #5. 2, 3, and 4 were CNN, The Boston Globe, and something called MoneyWeek.
On this query, The NYT didn't make it into the mix on Page 1 - they weighed in at #15, beaten by the New York Post (#13).
Also counter to Cadenhead's post: on my query, Wikipedia proved not to be a factor - not appearing in the top 50 results.
Isn't search funny? The results are highly query-dependent, and generic queries perform differently from more specific or unusual ones.
Posted by Andrew Goodman
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