Google Searches For What It Can't Find

The news business is battered and bleeding, and some people in it now want Google to pay. That is, the dominant search engine should compensate the publishers whose work it indexes and makes searchable. The notion that one site should pay other sites to which it links conflicts with the Web’s founding principles of openness, but it keeps coming up in Google’s case—and, increasingly, in Facebook’s.

First, the two make most of the money in the online ad market, accounting for 60.9% of U.S. digital advertising spending last year by the research firm eMarketers’ estimate. Second, business keeps getting worse for news publishers--and the novel-coronavirus pandemic has both made their work more necessary and incinerated much of their advertising revenues.

That’s undercut Google’s traditional defense: “Google helps publishers and journalists by helping people find news content and sending them to news sites,” as Google News head Richard Gingras wrote in a September 2019 post.

David Chavern, president of News Media Alliance, flicked the traffic-always-helps argument aside in an email: “That is impossible in a world where digital advertising is dominated by Google and Facebook, and that domination is growing by the day.” That Arlington, Va., trade group represents news publishers and supports requiring compensation from Google and Facebook.

So a campaign that had previously been limited to other countries is now picking up in the U.S. with calls for Google and perhaps Facebook to follow the recent examples of Australia and France by mandating compensation for publishers.

At the same time, Google is quietly testing a new experiment that would enable it to act as a sort of assignment editor for news sites by conveying Google searchers’ unanswered questions to them.

Google can make for a tempting punching bag, while today’s ink- or pixel-stained wretches ought to warrant some sympathy. But a rush to stick Google and Facebook with the bill for a broken journalism business model risks cementing current inequalities in the news ecosystem while leaving cancerous flaws in digital advertising untreated.

“I think anything that allows local and niche news organizations better realize the value of their journalism is a win—but I'm highly skeptical that a search-snippet tax is realistic for the U.S. any time soon,” emailed Amanda Zamora, co-founder and publisher of The 19th News, a nonprofit site covering politics and policy from a female perspective that’s due to launch this summer. “Publishers have already ceded so much to platforms -- and when they have had a seat at the table, it's been the same big publishers time and again.”

As in, Google and other search sites already neglect local publishers in their rankings. “They're dwarfed by the domain authority of big publishers when they decide to swoop in on a trend or story,” Zamora said.

“Even if [Google] was going to pay, it’s going to benefit the people who always benefit from platform plays—the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal,” said Damon Kiesow, a professor at the University of Missouri’s school of journalism. Kiesow also pointed to the practical difficulty of getting money to the right places: “If I were the product manager, how would I even account for that and get people checks?”

Chavern, with the News Media Alliance, suggested that the music industry offered a template in how hip-hop artists must license the samples that they use. But individual musicians have to negotiate those agreements; there’s no “compulsory license” regime like the one that lets cover bands play who they want and then make the appropriate payments through a rights clearinghouse like ASCAP.

“There have been other circumstances where people have worked out complex licensing arrangements around content—and, contrary to many tech complaints, it’s certainly not impossible,” Chavern said.

A news-royalty system would also require deciding which sites produce journalism versus words, images and video.

“What will count as news and who gets to be considered a publisher?,” asked Adam Engst, publisher of TidBITS, an Apple news site that touts itself as the oldest online-only tech publication. Engst, however, would still like Google to give back to the sites that make its existence possible and profitable: “If Google were to pay some non-trivial amount for the value that our content brings to its search results, I’d be very interested in that.”

Assigning value to what Google takes from a news site to list it in Google News or its general search raises other problems, in that there isn’t much taken. Google News only shows headlines and thumbnail previews of photos, while regular Google results also include brief snippets.

Is it a problem if a story’s headline alone spares the reader a click?

“Most people only consume the summary or snippet,” said Chavern. “The ‘free’ item often tells them all they need to know and provides the consumer value.”

Engst dismissed that concern, saying “Our articles are way too long for that to matter.”

Dan Pacheco, a journalism professor at Syracuse University, noted that news sites can always block Google from indexing or displaying their content if they want—and yet they don’t.

“Due to how information is atomized online with the article being more valuable than the front page, having deep links from search and social is almost a requirement for relevance in the digital landscape,” he said. “If the tech giants are forced by law to pay for news in certain countries, I think they are more likely to just stop indexing there. The very publishers that are supposedly being protected will be the first to beg Google and Facebook to list them again.”

Scott Brodbeck, publisher of ARLNow, a news site covering Arlington, Va., said in an email that getting new readers mattered more: “I want Google to highlight our articles and send us traffic, I don't have any expectation that they'll pay me for the privilege of sending me readers.”

Other search sites already offer a deeper preview of stories—see, for example, Microsoft’s Bing News, a better news-search site in many respects. But Google’s outsized weight makes it different from other search engines. It shapes the market in ways that other search sites can’t.

Journalists and their editors have obsessed for years over SEO—search engine optimization—to get their stories ranked higher in Google.

Question Hub, a feature Google launched in India, Indonesia, and Nigeria and is now quietly testing in the U.S., can surface when Google’s algorithms decide search results don’t adequately answer a user’s query. They may invite the user to submit a question to be relayed to unnamed publishers: “Get the answer you’re looking for added to the web.”

Google began testing this in the States weeks ago on COVID-19 topics, but Question Hub prompts now surface on unrelated pop-culture and tech queries.

“The question collection box can appear on topics not COVID-related, but currently we're only sharing COVID-related questions with health organizations,” emailed Google spokeswoman Lara Levin. “In this pilot phase, this isn't available to publishers.”

It remains unclear which U.S. publishers will be eligible for this closer look into Google search curiosity (that is, beyond the insights long available from Google Trends). Question Hub also risks passing on personal information from Google to third parties, although its prompts warn against sharing anything too close to home. Wrote Levin: “We do have systems trained to detect when personally identifiable information may have been input and we filter that out.”

Google essentially telling sites what information they should publish would represent a step forward in its shaping of the Web--which is already Google’s world, and we just live in it. That gets to the philosophical aspect of calls to make Google compensate the Web’s creators: It’s made the Web searchable for everyone but profitable for few besides itself.

As Pacheo put it: “Facing the possibility of having no quality journalism to link to in the future, could tech giants be compelled in some other way to pay as a form of good will for the value they’re getting?”

But Google (and Facebook) might do more good for news publishers by looking at aspects of their businesses that they can fix without creating new intellectual-property obligations. Zamora’s recommendations: “more transparent algorithms that reward credibility, accuracy and relevance of a news brand apart from its sheer size and influence as the standard across platforms.”

Engst said he’d like to see Google not leave so many results frozen in amber: “Even with Google’s normal search, it seems that Google anoints a particular page as the top hit, and there’s no way to dislodge it, even with better or more current content.”

But those ads that are supposed to reward traffic—and don’t require readers to break out credit cards to pay directly via subscription or membership, often a significant hurdle for the smaller publishers that already struggle for Google search relevance—offer the biggest potential for improvement. Today, that business ecosystem is outright toxic. A disturbing amount of the money spent on digital ads doesn’t reach publishers: 32.7% in an eMarketer study released last summer, 49% in a PwC study done for the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers and announced in May.

That newer report found that 15% of digital ad spend could not be traced to anybody, as if it fell off a truck somewhere. “The place you really need to fix is digital advertising,” said Kiesow.

Readers suffer from the results too, in the form of tacky “around the Web” ads pushing the same old schlock and “forced-redirect” ads that hijack their browsers and push malware or fraud. Oh, and all the tracking of their online habits required to target ads against their behavior.

ARLNow’s Brodbeck pointed back to Google’s domination of display ads. “It has conveniently avoided doing much of any innovating, thus making programmatic banner ads weak competition for its search ads,” he said. “Google should be compelled, via antitrust action or otherwise, to spin out the display ad side of its business.”

Without some sustainable way to make money, news sites may be left with two unsavory sources of support, Chavern warned: “the government and rich people.”

_Have you seen the Question Hub prompt appear in your search results? If you're comfortable sharing it publicly, tweet a screenshot to @Glimmer_.