Without going into too much detail, this is essentially true. The site is built on top of algorithms that were developed years ago, and there are some runbooks to help SREs keep the site running. However, there isn't much investment going on. Occasionally they'll have one engineer or an intern add a feature, but it's not permanently staffed.

Would this change if they started running ads on it?

I guess the question is, is the lack of investment because it's a cost-centre, or for some other reason?

One of the reasons is that Google doesn't seem to want to hire the "b" team.

And the "a" team I'm guessing doesn't want to work in a backwater place with no glory like "google news".

You know they only hire the best and the brightest and all of that. I'm sure even the person who gets hired as a janitor is a cut well above the average janitor. [1]

The funny part is there are plenty of people who would die to work at Google on anything. But they aren't the type (total conjecture here btw) that would ever pass the google interview process.

[1] I've always thought this was an interesting paradox. That is someone gets a job as a maid in the White House and works near the President let's say. So she/he must have something going for them to get that type of job. But yet they are still a maid in the white house. You would think if you are able to land that job you would have risen above that job.

>You would think if you are able to land that job you would have risen above that job.

What an awful thing to say. Some people like doing that type of work. There is nothing wrong with that. I don't think our society is destined for greatness when we devalue important work.

As an aside, my aunt did a lot of jobs and always went back to being a cleaner because thats what she likes to do.

> a backwater place with no glory like "google news".

I know they have lots of people working in their "social" wasteland (G+, hangouts, etc.). I can only assume they already gather most of the "news" tracking information by other means, so GN isn't worth supporting.

I guess I don't get why it's a backwater. They have insanely high traffic numbers. They have interesting problems of surfacing relevant news and grouping stories around topics. Seems like there are tons of cool things you could do with the site, if you were so inclined.

They can't run ads against it unless they manage to work out some arrangement with the News Publishers.

Technically they might have the legal right to do it, but the Google/News publisher relationship is already strained enough, and Google wouldn't want to strain it more.

I don't see why that would be true. Google News is just links to other sites like any other google search, except for some wire articles that they are actually paying for.

I use the number of blog posts a year in a Google product's blog as an estimate for its importance for Google:

2014: 3

2013: 3

2012: 8

http://googlenewsblog.blogspot.com

So not very important in last two years as it seems.

for comparison:

        Gmail:
        2014: 21
        2013: 25
        2012: 35
        2011: 84

        Reader:
        2013: 2
        2012: 0 (!)
        2011: 4
        2010: 16

Yea, I understand what Google is trying to do with their news site, but it'a not working--for me--in the Bay Area.

They have money to burn/waste/spoil Geniuses? Why not hire the best reporters and put together news sites for every country on the planet? Old fashioned reporting? Stop leaching off struggling news papers in order to obtain your content? The internet has destroyed so many good newspapers. Why not reverse the trend and bring back good journalism? Or just, give some of the struggling newspapers cold hard cash--in the form of a grant, before we lose them all? Or, they just become pet/vanity projects for rich tech guys?