More Ads With Your Google

Google's quest to cut costs and find new ad-revenue sources continues apace, as the company has announced it's killing Google Shared Stuff, a del.icio.us clone that enabled users to create profiles and bookmark nifty Web videos and Knol articles there, as a gestalt approximation of your quirky sense of what's interesting in the world. If you're using Shared Stuff (and almost no one is), you may have noticed that your profile page now contains a notice that the service will be discontinued as of March. But don't panic; Friendfeed, del.icio.us, and Facebook all do the same thing better anyway.

Meanwhile, the company has decided to include ads on its Google News service, ending a long-standing practice of leaving the site free of ads in hopes that the news page would pay for itself by keeping users dependent on Google for, well, everything. Now, Google News will have to actually bring in the cash.

This is just the latest episode in the company's attempt to seed more ads in its less-than-stellar-performing properties, the most prominent of which has to be embedding ads directly in YouTube videos. But the Google News move may not go over as smoothly as other efforts. News Web sites have long been uneasy about the prospect of Google algorithms scanning headlines and collating them on a separate page, but as long as Google wasn't selling ads next to the headlines, they could at least imagine that the search engine wasn't stealing advertising business from them. Now, that's no longer true, and Web sites from CNet to the New York Times may start complaining that Google is openly making money off of news content it doesn't produce.

There are a few counterarguments to this complaint, ably summed up by "recovering journalist" Mark Potts. First, news sites that refer to and link to other news sites are arguably doing the same thing, cribbing off of other people's work but not sharing any ad revenue from their own pages. Second, even when news sites use contextual ads over generic banner ads, they do a piss-poor job of search-optimization, which means that the contextual ads next to stories are often rarely relevant to the story they run alongside. (Of course, a big plank in Potts' argument, which addressed Google's news service in general, was that Google didn't sell ads on the news site. That, obviously, is no longer the case.)

Interestingly, Google, the undisputed king of contextual ads, has long had the same search-optimization problem when it comes to news searches. Do a search on a news site for stories on a given topic, and check out the Google ads that appear next to it; you'll find that they rarely have anything to do with the story at hand. And CNet notes that Google's new news ads have the same problem. Steven Musil tried a search for "spring training" and checked out the ads next to the list of stories; of the top three ads that popped up, he noticed, only one actually referred to baseball. The first two ads referred to spring semesters at educational institutes.

For some reason, Google's own contextual ad algorithms don't work nearly as well with news as they do with Web searches. And so the search to make news reporting pay off goes on.