There has been a lot of buzz on some of the blogs I read about the fact that although Google News indexes lots of news sources, only a few consistently rise to the top on a daily basis. It seems that just ten news sources account for 66% of all the hits on the first page of search results in Google News. See the original post from Digital Deliverance.
A lot of people have been surprised by this. But today I saw a comment in one of the blogs that I read that brought it into perspective (and I apologize that I can’t seem to find the locate that posting). It was pointed out that the Digital Deliverance study was only looking at results from the top page of hits in Google News. So it makes sense that the big news providers would dominate. When searching for news of a national scope, most people want stories from national news sources.
But for those that do want to see what the other news sources are reporting, they simply need to keep scrolling through the search results in Google News. The stories are there, they are just farther down in the search results. Seems like that’s how it should be to me.