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February 28, 2008

Obituaries Are Not Wanted in Google News

A Google Groups has a member complaining about the number of obituaries found in Google News, the local section. It is from there I learn, that generally, Google doesn't want obituaries in Google News.

Google News Guide Marcela said:

BonBon is right -- these articles generally shouldn't be included in Google News at all. If you send us the URLs to the sites, we can do a little detective work. Here's the form you can use to report these issues:

http://www.google.com/support/news/bin/request.py

Thanks for your help!

I guess that is an editorial decision by Google News. But on the local front, would some people like to read obituaries? I personally have no interest in that but I am sure some people do.

Forum discussion in Google Groups.



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posted rustybrick in Other Google Topics at February 28, 2008 9:15 AM Comments (2)

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Comments

It would depend on the obituary (and/or the person who passed away) but, yes, there is a market for obituary content. Maybe there is an obituary news service that should engage in some active marketing.

 

Posted by Michael Martinez at February 28, 2008 14:05

Coming from a newspaper's perspective yes, obituary content is huge. Obits are consistently one of the top 5 search queries on our site each month. And I know for a fact that not all of our visitors come to our site first to look for or browse the obits; many times they will go to a search engine first. I can understand not wanting to include death notices because there just isn't much content there, but the full-blown obituaries are nothing but, and are oftentimes about very prominent people in the community. Local readers gobble that stuff up.

 

Posted by Vandy at March 4, 2008 16:20

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