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."

Comments

War on news sources?

[tmk]

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.

Re:Euphamism of the Week

[Tar-Palantir]

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".

I would have done the same thing

[Ars-Fartsica]

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!

Try putting "Newsbot Biased" in their search

[T-Kir]

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Yep, I think that says it all really.