There’s a school of thought that says video is the future of information, that rich media is the endpoint of the evolution of text. I don’t know that I buy that, since text still has so many advantages over video: its scannability, its searchability, how much easier it usually is to create and polish. But [...]

Discussions involving Google and news organizations took a technical turn this week. Robots.txt files, search crawlers, click caps … I’m guessing most people aren’t intimately familiar with these things (and if you are, this piece isn’t for you). I figured it might be useful to strip away the tech jargon and filter a couple of [...]

In 2006, Boston.com launched a local search tool that was supposed to be a big part of the site’s future. The project made perfect sense on paper: Readers would get search results focused on eastern Massachusetts. Those results would mix the best of the machine and human worlds by using algorithms and editors’ picks. Next [...]

“I’m not saying Google’s an enemy, all right?” the chief executive of The Associated Press, Tom Curley, was telling a few people in Hong Kong on Tuesday. “I’m saying they were brilliant, and we didn’t, collectively, license as aggressively as we could have. So now there’s this moment, and the two of them are competing.” [...]

Last week, I attended the Transparent Text symposium at IBM’s offices in Cambridge. The conference focused on text-based data storage, analysis, and visualization — awesomely nerdy stuff, in other words.
Some of the presentations would be familiar to loyal readers of this site: Amanda Michel’s distributed reporting at ProPublica, Ethan Zuckerman’s Media Cloud and “nutritional [...]

Yesterday we revealed plans by The Associated Press to hold back some content from member websites. (Great discussion going on there, by the way.) The primary motivation of that initiative is search: AP material that resides on hundreds of disparate sites at the same time will hardly rate in Google compared to a single page [...]

As the newspaper industry has grown weaker and weaker, there has been a steady stream of articles and blog posts blaming Google for some or all of this decline. I’m not going to link to them all, because there are simply too many, and they are easy enough to find. The standard allegation is that [...]

There are lots of problems with the traditional business models of news organizations, but one of the biggest is the emergence of search advertising. This is the way Google makes most of its money ($21.1 billion in ‘08): the idea that an ad that is generated by someone’s search terms can be far more targeted [...]

Times Open, the conference for software developers hosted by The New York Times on Friday, suspended the typical gloom about the future of newspapers in favor of a mandate best captured by the keynote speaker, web entrepreneur Tim O’Reilly. “If there’s some feature you want” on NYTimes.com, he said, “don’t wait for the Times to [...]