Not news: Google says weekly hot topics show is ‘a marketing video’

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A woman on camera reads highlights about the last week’s major events.

‘The nationwide recall of half a billion eggs due to a salmonella outbreak that left hundreds of people sick was reason enough for people across the country to search on Google,’ she says in a bubbly voice. She then talks about the winner of the Miss Universe pageant, and finally, the 90th anniversary of women’s suffrage.

It isn’t a TV news broadcast. Rather, it’s The Google Beat, a weekly 90-second program on YouTube (which is owned by Google) that the Internet search company launched Friday.

Google spokeswoman Anne Espiritu anchors the videos, which detail the three topics that got the biggest increases in Google search requests during the week, nationwide.

Well, not strictly the top three -- the Mountain View, Calif., company does not count pornography sites for this measurement.

On The Google Beat, Espiritu doesn’t just give the stats; she adds some context. For example, when discussing the egg recalls, she talks about the size of the recall and the number of people who have gotten sick. That’s outside the norm for Google, which has maintained that when it comes to the news, it simply indexes stories from a large number of sources on the Web.

The establishment of Google Beat does not, however, mean the company is going into the content business, spokesman Gabriel Stricker said. He described the new service as a ‘marketing video.’

‘The point of these videos is to answer the question of what people are searching for,’ Stricker said.

Other Internet giants, including Yahoo and AOL, do produce their own news content.

Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said as recently as February at the Mobile World Conference, ‘We are not going into the content business.’

-- Mark Milian
twitter.com/markmilian