US newspapers in the Google time tunnel: Part 2
Yesterday I started looking at a selection of US newspapers through the 'time tunnel' of Google's 2001 search engine index.
Today, I'm going to continue with a look at another 14 American newspapers, starting with some of the New York press.
New York Daily News
The 2001 edition of the New York Daily News online billed itself as "New York's hometown connection"
The site was number one for a search of its name, but Google seems to have lost some of the details in the intervening years.
New York Post
The New York Post also topped Google in 2001 when you searched for their name. Sadly, the version of the site stored by the Wayback Machine from 2001 is quite badly broken.
New York Times
The New York Times is these days considered one of the Internet's newspapers of record, but in 2001 their homepage did not rank #1 for their brand name on Google.
Instead a page from their jobs site, and a copyright notice occupy the top two slots.
Incidentally, a search for just 'new york' on Google 2001 turns up the New York Times at #8, the New York Daily News at #20 and the New York Post at a lowly #85.
Newark Star-Ledger
When searching for it by name, the Newark Star-Ledger's nj.com site was firmly at #1.
Newsday
Newsday had two different ways to access the site in the top four Google rankings for their name in 2001. As well as the Newsday site itself, users were invited to visit library.newsday.com.
The Oregonian
The excellently named The Oregonian these days publishes at oregonlive.com, but back in Google's 2001 time-frame - oregonian.com was the #1 result, with the Oregon Live sports section coming in at #3.
Philadelphia Inquirer
Another newspaper to have transposed URLs between 2001 and 2008 is the Philadelphia Inquirer. Nowadays you'll find it at philly.com, but the number one result for 'Philadelphia Inquirer' in Google's 2001 index was www.phillynews.com.
The Sacramento Bee
The Sacramento Bee was already available at the shortened sacbee.com URL, and ranked #1 for the paper's name in 2001.
San Diego Union-Tribune
There is yet another URL branding change with the San Diego Union-Tribune. In 2001, you could find the paper on Google at uniontrib.com. There was also a separate advertising sales site at www.utads.com. In 2008, however, the URL and branding of the site is 'Sign on San Diego'.
San Francisco Chronicle
The San Francisco Chronicle had a logjam of related URLs at the top of Google in 2001. As well as sfgate.com, there were separate sites for sponsored events, the San Francisco marathon which the paper sponsored, and for their ad sales operation.
St. Petersburg Times
The 2008 version of the St. Petersburg Times appears on tampabay.com, which ranked #2 on Google in 2001 for the search 'St. Petersburg Times'. At number one was the now defunct www.stpetersburgtimes.com URL, and, muddying the waters further, at #3 and #4 was the sptimes.com sports and business sections.
USA Today
USA Today is an interesting case from a search point of view, because the Google of 2001 only seems to have five references to the paper by name if you spell it with a space as "USA Today", yet 334,000 references if you run it together as one word.
In the 2008 version of Google - the reverse is true. "USA Today" generates over 60 million results, whilst "USAToday" reveal just 15 million results.
USA Today has blocked the Wayback machine, so there is no archive of the 2001 version of the site itself.
Wall Street Journal
Even though in 2001 the Wall Street Journal was operating an online subscription model for content, they haven't blocked the Internet Archive project, and so, unlike with USA Today, you can see what the site looked like back then.
As one of the leading news sources on the web, wsj.com was #1 on Google in 2001.
Washington Post
The last of the 25 US newspapers I've been looking at is the Washington Post, and it has one of the worst rankings in the 2001 version of Google, only managing to come seventh.
That link wasn't even to the news content itself, but rather to a corporate info page.
And finally...
I'll be returning to look at US newspapers in the next few weeks, to reveal the results of my study measuring their success on social media.