Google: Uniting and igniting

12/11/09 posted by Liz Niland

Google can now add another feather to its already heaving bow. A father and his long-lost daughter have been reunited after 30 years apart using the search giant’s facilities. April Antoniou, 30, of Georgia typed “Scott Robert Becker Looking For April” into Google, hoping her father would be returned in the results.

It turns out Scott Becker, of Kansas, had been hoping his daughter would do just that: he created a website years ago thinking that if he couldn’t track April down, hopefully she would attempt to Google herself to find out about her father. How’s that for search engine optimisation?

You’ve may have heard the fuss Rupert Murdoch is creating about his desire to charge users for accessing the content contained on the News Corp. websites, namely the Wall Street Journal. One of his biggest concerns is the way Google aggregates content into its news pages. Murdoch has even threatened to block his sites from being crawled by Google.

Although calls have been made on the negative impact this would have for readership, Murdoch seems to be adamant in his quest for paid content. “They don’t suddenly become loyal readers of our content,” Murdoch said on the WSJ blog. “We’d rather have fewer people coming to our website but paying.”

Hitwise released data on their blog this week that shows how detrimental this might be for Murdoch. “In fact, on a weekly basis, Google and Google news are the top traffic providers for WSJ.com accounting for over 25% of WSJ.com’s traffic.” They also uncovered statistics that over 44% of the visitors directed from Google are potentially new users who have not visited the domain in the last 30 days.