Private Eye brought us an insight into the world of Google-chasing last week.

The satirical magazine and media-baiter revealed the “secrets of the Telegraph’s online success” after the newspaper claimed to have became the most-read daily paper on the web.

To quote from the Private Eye story: “News hacks [at the Daily Telegraph] are now sent a memo three or four times a day from the web site boffins listing the top subjects being searched in the last few hours on Google. They are then expected to write stories accordingly and/or get as many of those key words into the first paragraph of their story. Hence, if the top stories being Googled are ‘Britney Spears’ and ‘breast cancer’, hey presto, the hack is duly expected to file a piece about young women ‘such as Britney Spears’ being at risk from breast cancer.”

This sort of behaviour – relentlessly and shamelessly chasing the maximum number of hits from Google searches or Google News – is one of the unspoken facets of the internet news age.

From an editor’s point of view, one of the great things about the web is that you can track precisely what stories are being read and which are not. It is valuable information to understand the topics that matter to our audience – but some web sites take it to the sort of extreme described above.

In the IT world, if Computing were to publish more stories featuring Linux, Apple, open source product names, Microsoft product names, virus names, music downloads, iTunes or iPods – among others – it would comfortably provide a boost to our page impressions. The fact that we don’t reflects our desire to serve the needs of our target audience –senior IT decision-makers in the UK, whose interests lie in best practice technology implementations, case studies, market intelligence, skills and careers issues, leadership, management and how technology relates to the key business issues of the day.

If we really went hell-for-leather for hits, we could work in the occasional mention of Britney Spears or UFOs or Kate Moss. I’m sure Britney and Kate own a PC, so there’s bound to be an IT angle. In fact, I bet they own a trendy Mac, so double those hits.

The internet has been great for journalism – and more importantly for readers – but a future of Google-chasing strategies benefits nobody.

Readers would end up with the same old re-hashed stories about the same old topics, with little differentiation or editorial agenda to make them interesting beyond the basic facts. Worse, you would lose the diversity of topics needed to inform, entertain and educate.

For journalists, Google-chasing is the antithesis of good investigative reporting. If a specialist web site breaks a fantastic, exclusive, authoritative, ground-breaking story, Google will largely ignore it because its news selection algorithm assumes that the more web sites are featuring a particular story, the more important it must be. If one site breaks a great exclusive that does not go into the mainstream, it will barely be read. Chasing hits means chasing the stories that rank highest on Google, not necessarily the stories that matter.

And for advertisers – without whom, of course, there would not be the multitude of news sites available on the web – they lose the ability to target potential customers that comes from the in-depth understanding of a particular audience and their unique needs and interests.

If you want to read about reality TV stars and minor celebrities everywhere, the Google-chasing future will be for you. If you prefer bold to bland, diversity to conformity, special interests to special offers, then I hope your needs will be met too.