Girl Journalist

I heard about the fire in Missoula, Montana on NPR. I know people who live there and as a concerned friend I wanted to find out more. I wanted pictures, maybe a map showing where the fire was…nothing too fancy. Just some good old breaking news multimedia coverage.

I Googled “missoula fire” and of the top five links, none of them were news-related. Even under Google’s “News results” header there were only two links: the San Diego Union Tribune and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Both were AP wire stories by Susan Gallagher.

I could’ve clicked on the Google News results for “missoula fire” but I was feeling lazy. I wonder how many other internet news readers are like me?

What the…?

I decided it might be “neat” to conduct an experiment.

I went to Yahoo and searched “missoula fire” and got this…

No news.

Yahoo also suggested searching “wildland fire” but that didn’t do any better.

Next, I went to MSN and searched “missoula fire” and got this…

No news.

So now I’m really hyped up about this. I go to Technorati and search “missoula fire.”
One girl’s photojournalism blog and that’s about it.

And then YouTube…
One news video,Wildfire emergency in Montana from Reuters. And a lot of other interesting Missoula video. Something titled “Burning Down Our Neighbor’s Condemned House.”

*Note: Using “missoula fire” in quotes provided more relevant content.

And last, I searched Flickr….
Flickr won. We found 275 results for photos matching missoula and fire.

*Note: Using “missoula fire” in quotes narrowed down the Flickr results to just 23. Still…

This was an interesting experiment.

Now granted, it could be that be that the news was too new to show up on Google, Yahoo or MSN. Or it could be that the news was not “big” enough to justify buying keywords around the topic. Or it could be that we don’t know how to optimize our content for search.

I’m going to go with number three, Bob.

It’s called Search Engine Optimization baby. It’s called understanding the medium and understanding how to optimize your content to draw the maximum number of eyeballs. Eyeballs = advertisers = money.

If you still don’t know what I’m talking about, call me. My colleague Paul Pedersen and I will fill you in.