COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW – 10/05/2019
Nicholas Diakopoulos
IN THE LAST WEEK OF APRIL, nearly 23 percent of all traffic to news sites tracked by web analytics firm Parse.lycame from search engines. Google alone accounts for nearly half of external referral traffic—traffic, that is, that comes from platforms, apps, and other outside sources— to news sites. Together with the fact that Facebook referral traffic is on the wane, this means that Google’s search algorithm is now perhaps the most powerful mediator of online attention to news.