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MS admits Newsbot Biased Towards MSNBC
JasdonLe writes "According to this article at the Washington Post, Microsoft's recently unleashed news aggregator site, Newsbot will choose to display MSNBC articles over other articles on the same topic.
"As Newsbot resides on MSNBC and is branded as such, MSNBC is considered a first among equals, meaning that if they and another top-tier source offer the same story, information, etc., MSNBC will be listed first, followed by other sources," says Elizabeth Herrera Smith, Microsoft spokeswoman."
I checked the MSN newsbot and was suprised to find there (German) articles, that news.google.com didn't find. In the other way, MSN didn't know most sources of Google news.
What is the deal for content publishers to give MSN and Google access to their databases? If it is readers attention, this way is the wrong way.
Could MSN adopt paid content for their newsbot? This would be another business modell.
Of course, if you were paying attention you'd realize that Newsbot isn't displaying ONLY MSNBC articles, but MSNBC articles first (in addition to others) IF multiple news organizations are reporting the same story.
So... it's not like they're shutting out anybody. And Newsbot is part of MSNBC, so really, what would you expect, for Newsbot to ALWAYS prefer other news organization's stories over MSNBC? Is that "unbiased" enough for you?
That euphemism's been around for a long, long time. It really dates back to at least Emperor Augustus 2000 years ago, calling himself "first citizen" and "first among equals".
primus inter pares: http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/primus%2 0inter%20pares
First of all, MSNBC gets its news mostly from the wire services like most other news websites, so cool it with the unwarranted bias talk. This makes sense. The MS developers can talk directly with MSNBC folks and try to get more advanced crawling and indexing methods in place. This is why MS is involved in MSNBC in the first place - integration. Don't you think Yahoo gets the inside scoop on how Yahoo News articles are formatted directly from the developer? Or any other portal for that matter? Shock and amazement - employees talk to each other!
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Yep, I think that says it all really.
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
Or maybe because N(ational)BC is centered in the Nation of America (gasp)
> Perhaps I'm thick, but this kind of seems obvious
> to me. How else would anyone expect them to do it?
Well if they're trying to be a better google than google, they should be at least as objective as news.google.com. When that a Microsoft Worm DOSed several search engines, including google, many news sites mis-reported 'Google had a crippling virus on the heals of it's IPO announcement. Google sucks.'. Guess what, Those misleading stories were the top stories in the business and tech pages. To me, this shows that google news tries to be objective and the don't appear to censor or rank Google-favourable stories above anti-Google news stories.
Microsoft's news site is just a Microsoft mouthpiece, not a google news competitor.
"How do you know?"
Because their results display no bias. How hard is that to figure out?
I love Google because they have no bias.
Actually, the fact that the bot has no bias is by their own admission one of their biggest problems. The Google News bot cannot tell the difference between news and editorial/opinion sources. Google is still working on a solution to this huge problem. News and Opinion are a dangerous mix.In fact, John Young at Cryptome has a post up describing how Google refused to provide him services for reasons it will not explain. That Cryptome is not exactly a favorite of the powers-that-be wouldn't factor in to that, would it? Probably not, but how do you know? What other information is Google not providing to you, or biasing down, that you don't know about?
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