Sports Personality of Year Award: Chris Hoy - The Sun beats The Daily Mail by 3 minutes

It's the Sports Personality of Year Award here in the UK. This is an award that has had a lot of build up and there is a tremendous amount of interest in it due to Britain's success in the Olympics this year.

This is a perfect example of a timetabled event which traditional news and blogs could have been waiting to leap at. The search traffic for the result and the winner will be huge. I heard the results first via Twitter from the Guardian writer @jemimakiss. Chris Hoy won.

So, who got their first?

The Sun got into Google News first... by three minutes. This may be because The Sun got the news live first, because Google News crawls The Sun more quickly or more often or a spot of luck on the timing of the Google News crawl.

Let's look at the quality of the articles though; here's The Sun and here's the Daily Mail. The Daily Mail's article is longer. Its likely to catch more keywords.

What's more important is that Google News has picked up a photograph from the Daily Mail. Unfortunately it's not a photograph of Chris Hoy. Google News, however, doesn't really know that and until it finds another picture to use we'll see tonight's news results cluster around this photograph. This is the sort of news item that will likely homepage on Google News UK and whereas there will be hundreds of news stories there will only be a few pictures. The Daily Mail will do well in the long run.

By the way; if you do want to see a picture of Chris Hoy then here he is with some people from bigmouthmedia a day before a mighty charity bike and hike. This is the very picture I was looking for when Flickr started to throw up weird search shoutout effects (which have not reoccurred)

Popular Posts