The death of Tim Russert of NBC News that month quickly became a top story on the biggest U.S. news sites.

The front page of Google News took about an hour to catch up.

Google blamed a technical problem for the delay and said it was not a sign that its news site, whose substance is compiled entirely by computer programs, lacks timeliness.

Still, while news organizations nag about what Google is doing to their business, the company is far from achieving the kind of dominant position in news that it has in other areas. Six years after its start, Google News appears to be stuck in neutral and struggling to keep up with rivals.

Several online media experts say Google has done little to change the site in recent years, particularly when compared with its other products like Google Maps or Gmail, which get new features at a rapid pace.

Perhaps as a outcome, traffic growth

is sluggish. With 11.4 million users in May, Google News ranked No. 8 among news sites, far behind Yahoo News, which was No. 1 with 35.8 million visitors, according to Nielsen Online.

Its growth rate of 10 percent by the past two years is far slower than that of most other large Web news sites. Indeed, in the past two years, second-ranked MSNBC.com grew by 42 percent, adding 10.4 million users. Traffic at CNN.com and NYTimes.com grew even faster.

While it is clearly past the experimental stage, Google News still shows no ads, and there are no signs that Google is serious about making money from the site directly.

“I’ve actually been surprised at how little it has evolved, at least on the surface,” said Dan Gillmor, director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at the journalism school of Arizona State University. “I’m guessing that Google isn’t so certain…

Orginal post by Top Tech News