Found a link on Scripting News to this interesting Wired article about the New York Times' relationship with Google and the Internet in general. Adam Penenberg remarks that New York Times articles rarely come up in Google searches.
Two years ago, Martin Nisenholtz, chief executive of New York Times Digital, bet $1,000 that nytimes.com would outrank all blogs on Google by 2007, based on a search of five keywords on a topical news issue. Unless Google and the Times work on their relationship -- Nisenholtz says they're talking, although they haven't come up with any answers yet -- there may be a day when The New York Times doesn't show up at all on the Net's most popular search engine. Ultimately, this could be a direct threat to the Times' legacy.
I would argue that the future for the Times is not quite so dire, despite the fact that their archive - every NYTimes article older than a week - still uses a pay-per-article model. They have embraced RSS (although the official feeds include less articles than the old Userland feeds did), and they do, as Penenberg notes, have a partnership with Google News (some searching there can uncover Google partner links that remain free despite being over a week old). Perhaps they need to work on better titles.
At 9:49 on July 19, 2004, Xor: The Musings of Martey Dodoo wrote:
Searching for NYTimes Dave Winer writes about getting a New York Times article as the third hit in a Google search for Britt Blaser in New York. He calls it "a milestone." I disagree, as he used the words "new york" in his query (which, when used alone, will bring up th...