DMN Managing Editor suggests Google best for searching DMN site

Dallas Morning News managing editor George Rodrigue, on the paper's opinion blog, responded to a reader complaining about how poorly dallasnews.com's search engine functions. Rodrigue said Google was the best way to search. On the blog, DMN staffers comment by agreeing how the site's search function sucks.
Here's the link (click on the link in the link to see Rodrigue's original post):
http://dallasmorningviewsblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2008/07/how-to-search-d.html

Wanna find out about something written in the DMN (or posted on its blog) in the last week? Last month? Last year? Well, heck, dear reader, just leave the DMN web site and go to Google.

This is just another example of how the newspaper business is doomed.

 

Makes you wonder just how long publishers are going to wait before they actually do something with this grand ol' Yahoo! consortium they've been so happily patting themselves on the back over (see today's MediaNews memo -- if the full text gets posted here -- for an example.)

And yeah, most newspaper's search functions suck mightily (the New York Times is an exception.) Of course, since newspaper librarians are a thing of the past ... who the hell can get their content organized enough to be searched these days anyway?

 

"Our site sucks. Go to Google and help them make money!"

 

My understanding is many newspapers (including DMN) are in bed with Yahoo and must use them as the search engine for the site. I think this was a spinoff of papers partnering with Yahoo for ads and help wanted classifieds and such. Anyone have insight on the Yahoo thing?

And Buckdub, not having a newsroom librarian doesn't have a thing to do with searching a newspaper's website. Unless that person was a web developer, there's nothing they could organize to improve a website search function. Sites, at least the back-end CMS, are pretty well organized already. It's just the strength of the query.

 

True. I'm just speaking of archiving in general -- newspapers are piss-poor at it, and a large part of the reason is because no one is left to do it. Searching the Web site is only part of that particular problem.

 

I agree. I don't think my paper even has much of a morgue to speak of, and I know we lost our librarian in a round of buyouts.

 

That's the same issue with my shop. Yahoo! partnership began with the ads and crossed over into the search engine.
I'll see if I can get more info.

 

Here at my shop, we've been filing our own stuff in our own sports morgue for the past 10 years. It's proven to be an invaluable resource and time saver on many occasions.

 

A former shop of mine didn't keep a paper morgue for space reasons (small building). "All our archives are online!" they said.

Until the day they switched website providers. Poof. Stories before that date were gone. All of them.

 

Microfilm, baby.

 

Can anyone explain what happened to Yahoo's search engine? A few years ago I used it constantly and it seemed on par with Google, now it's almost unusable.

 

Say what you will about other ownership models, but I would nominate the late-era DMN as one of the least successful new-economy newspapers of the past 20 years. It's a descent to, I don't know, irrelevance.