The Rapid Googlizing of the News

(MoneyWatch)  Psst. Something is going on over at Google News. Nobody I know is talking but all you have to do is put two and two together to visualize an exponential answer, you know, 256, 512, 1024, 2048...

First, according to a company blog, a GN redesign is underway, featuring "... a 'featured photo' section that uses images from AFP, The Associated Press, Reuters, marking the first time when Google News promotes stories just because it has the permission to show associated images... If you are logged in, the new interface personalizes all the sections, not just the front page, and you can switch to the non-personalized version to see the differences."

The new look also reportedly highlights the most popular news stories.

Now, put this news together with Google's underhyped beta launch last week of Knol. (A knol is defined as a unit of knowledge.) The company uses the term to identify "authoritative article about a specific topic." Early speculation has focused on Knol as Google's answer to Wikipedia. But my take is that this will turn out to be more closely related to the coming expansion of Google News.

Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis has speculated that Knol may be Google's first attempt to get into the content creation business. He notes that Knol entries are already appearing high up in Google search results, leading him to reason that the effort may be designed to work like this:

1. Hire writers (on contingency)
2. Distribute these pages in Google's search results
3. Sell advertising against it in the form of AdSense
4. Pay the writers via AdSense split
5. Create an archive on Knol for future monetization

Smells like content creation to me. What makes this scenario entirely credible is the overriding business logic that Google will seek further monetization for its news product.

Despite the rapidly growing global audience for news, which is boosting many other media companies' traffic at a rapid rate, Google News has remained relatively static, and has actually been falling behind other news providers. On the other hand, Google is driving much of the new traffic to news sites, both through keyword search and via Google News links.

It is this last factor that is keeping most of the content creators silent, despite their long-standing fear that Google will become a competitor. If these trendlines continue to emerge from the Mountain View behemoth, expect this relative silence to be shattered soon.