Slashdot Mirror
Are You Ogling Google News?
heytal asks: "Yes, It's old news, and you all have been to Google News at least once. And yes, it crawls Slashdot and considers it as one of the news sources too ;-).This article is an interesting article on how things work, and how Google News would change the industry. What I want to ask the Slashdot users is their experience with Google News, how much they use it, and how has it changed their news surfing habbits?"
I'm not reading it because I don't like the layout much, and it has more than I'm normally interested in reading.
This does not mean that I wouldn't use it for particular stories of interest.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
However, Google News has an advantage in that it covers news sites from all over the world, and presumably the more coverage an issue gets, the more prominently it is displayed. This technically provides less bias in news stories (i.e. not so US-centric).
So, I read both sites.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
I'm still getting a feel for it. Previously, I've been relying mostly on a customized my.yahoo.com page. (Before that, I used my.excite.com until they clobbered it with the bankruptcy.) I like that Yahoo has local news, so I can get my local paper's headlines. Perhaps Google will eventually get a bunch of local sections set up and let you customize which ones you use, but that would require creating accounts (I would hate to have that much info stored in a cookie, as I would have to recreate it on each computer).
Anyway, it will be interesting to ask the same question in a month.
It would be nice if google had a front page along the lines of slashdot the I could customize to display the headlines I am most interested in.
Also maybe some kind of MORE NEWS link that showed more headlines from the topic I am reading (such as Science and Technology) that listed more of todays stories that are not necessarily the top stories.
Google invents McNews
So where does one go to get real content if everyone follows the google model?
-Sean
The way it's organized actually helps me dig deeper more easily on stories that grab me... I can scan for bias across several sources much more readily that way. AND it's a clearinghouse!! Kind of like the Drudge Report, without the disadvantage of having Matt Drudge in charge.
For a few years now I've been copying the text of articles into a .txt files, and saving it in a news database, creating my own personal mini-lexis nexus for research purposes, as you never know when a link is going to go dead.
I don't actually read the stories half the time, just copy the text for later searches. A random smattering of recent stories is just what the doctor ordered half the time, as with most things google, the results of the news searches are, for the most part, highly relevant. Yahoo's searches through AP/reuters never quite did it for me, so it's a welcome edition to my news gathering arsenal.
"Inattention makes clowns of us all" -Bean
This article is a blatent attempt by the editors of Slashdot to get Google linking recursivly to them. Nice try guys.
Reality has a liberal bias
Ok, maybe I'm just pissy because Poliglut and slashdot do the same exact thing (re-reporting of news) and slashdot is a google news source while I'm not (and, just for the record, I think neither should be) but...
The funniest line in that article had to be:
"What savvy publishers of registration-required sites must do, he says, is work with Google in order to be included in their news searches."
Er, savvy? Really. How about not completely brain dead. It doesn't require savvy or any other synonym for smart to realize that google is a big site and that, if your goal is hits, you should be listed there.
Do 'savvy' webmasters register their sites with search engines? No. They are *way* past that 1994 era stumbling block to glory.
This is no different.
Right up until the release announcement, news.google.com was live, had a *great* layout consisting of really simple, single column text with no images or tables, and was even easier to navigate. I loved it.
:-(
Then Google changed things to look like a traditional news site.
May we never see th
Shows the results sorted by "date", while this perhaps be fixed, I find it interesting to see when the various news orginizations picked up an article.
If you change the sort to "relevance" it imediatly folds to a single article.
I live in a giant bucket.
The previous layout was a whole lot simpler, just a simple list of categories, top stories within each, and four or five links to that story from different sources. One nice touch was that the link for each story was the headline used for it, which was nice because you could tell at a glance who was just repeating a wire feed and who really had something worthwhile -- and sometimes you could get nicely contrasting stories (like, say, the same event in Kashmir as described by both Indian & Pakistani news sources). The new, more complex & busy layout doesn't allow them to do this anymore, which IMO is a change for the worse.
AS for the new layout, I dunno. It has much higher information density, which the Edward Tufte fan in me thinks is a very good thing. But it's a very busy layout, and so a bit overwhelming to me. I'm finding that I haven't spent as much time on the new version as I was before on the old one, and I'm not checking it as often either -- maybe just a cursory glance once or twice a day, as opposed to a more careful skim several times a day before. Compared to the sparse layouts that Google ordinarily uses, a design this heavy feels very jarring to me, where on another site I probably wouldn't care. Hopefully I'll get over this.
Here's an interesting angle though, from the article the original submitter noted:
Why can't Slashdot come up with such an arrangment? The NY TImes is one of the best news sources on the 'net, and I'm sure their staff has to have at least some Slashdot fans. The constant whining disclaimers about having to register -- and the even more bizarre constant opposition to the very idea -- could all be short-circuited if the two sites could enter into a similar arrangement. Why has this never happened? Lack of imagination, or is one side or the other just uninterested? Whatever the obstacle has been, I'd be happy if we could just get over it and set up some kind of arrangement.
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
Here's a quote from the mentioned article "Google News already has made arrangements with some leading news sites that use registration schemes -- such as The New York Times. Google News users who click on links to NYTimes.com articles at Google News go directly to the article -- there's no intervening registration screen -- even if they're not already registered at NYTimes.com. This works, explains product manager Mayer, because the site allows Google's spiders to crawl its content and include links in the Google service. When a non-registered user hits a NYTimes.com page, the site will recognize that it's a referral from Google News and serve up the content -- delaying the registration requirement for one page. When the Google News user tries to go elsewhere on NYTimes.com, then the registration system kicks in. If the user is already registered, then NYTimes.com reads the user's NYT cookie and doesn't ask for registration information." Which of course means that now I can read all the ones mentioned in ./ without registering!! I propose that it now be a requirement that all links to the NYT be through Google. Just my($.02);
Karma: Bizzare (mostly affected by varying internal caffeine levels.)
Slashdot: A Google 4000 News Site.
google news really makes me feel like I have an even better feel for what is happening in the world than I would have if I visited my usual dozen news sites. (cnn, nytimes, washington post, bbc, new scientist, burligton, vt free press, champlain channel, etc.)
At the moment, the sci-tech section shows: National Geographic subliminal tree in a zen garden and Slashdot apple open-sourcing Rendezvous. Tony blair has the headline, and the world section has a story on the ivory coast that I really appreciate that is just the kind of story that I wouldn't see on american news, but would show up on the news overseas.
I love how often it's updated. I can visit it a few times an hour, and it has a great ballance of important stories staying, and fluffy, but interesting stories passing through.
My only wish is that it had a nytimes - style NASDAQ graph or some other indicator of the financial news.
-Jim
Celebrate Excellence!
That's why I go there -- and have for a long time. Google is what CNN used to be... for me, at least.
The best part of it is that the content comes from a much more diverse set of sources than I'd ever be willing to surf on my own. I'd like to see a full list of the sites they're crawling, but I've been happy with their results so far.
- CNN has become progressively worse. It used to be a large page of stories, and I could find out what was going on in the world in a single page load. Now things are down to (something like) two links per catgory, and you have to dig to find your news.
- MSNBC has stuck with their layout (to their credit), but there's all those menues (or interstitial ads) to deal with -- ick.
- Salon is a giant editorial page, not news. I'm not even going to comment on their in-your-face ads (oops, I just did...)
- Fox News, ABC, USA Today -- I never had any desire to read their sites for some reason.
- Newspaper sites are often too regional (local papers), or require registration (NY Times, Washington Post), so I just didn't read 'em. They'll learn eventually that registration = less readership = less banner ad revenue. Give 'em time, the clue will come.
- NPR is nice, but usually rather thin on the news. I go there to stream audio, not read stories.
The only thing that would make Google News better would be a "Fringe" category -- but I get my weekly dose of that at News of the Weird."...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
Of course no one really new about this because no one uses AltaVista anymore (at least not their news area). The only reason I knew about it was because Matt Drudge occasionally uses links from there on his page.
And, I guess with Google News you can get any NYT article without registering.
It amazes me at how often the New York Times is lauded on /. as the standard by which all other news sites should be measured when, frankly, it's nothing special.
If you want to see how it should be done look at the BBC's news site, news.bbc.co.uk/, which is available in both UK and world editions. Far less bias, far more coverage, far better analysis. Basically, it makes the NYT site (and most other news sites) look amateur by comparison.
Looking at the Google News home page right now there are only two articles from the NYT linked to and plenty more from other US media outlets, including the Boston Globe, Miami Herald, SF Chronicle, Seattle Times, International Herald Tribune, USA Today and Fox News. By comparison, there are ten stories that link to the BBC's news site, including the current lead article.
It's not a scientific analysis but it does indicate that the BBC is perhaps a broader and more widely respected news outlet than the NYT.
(Here endeth the rant.)
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Cool! I never knew about that.
Reality has a liberal bias
Google News looks pretty nice. Normally I wouldn't have a problem with it.
But they've got a meta refresh tag in there so that the page continually reloads, and I have absolutely zero tolerance for any site that does that, so I don't plan on making it a regular stop for me unless they take it off.
(Yes, I've already sent email to news-feedback about it)
--
viqsi - See "vixen"
If we do not change our direction we are likely to end up where we are headed.
Envy my 5 digit Slashdot User ID!
This is the BBC
Love it or hate it, the BBC is the best source of news in the world.