Optimizing News Sites For Google News

It's google's job to give balanced news by BoldAC · 2004-09-24 05:46 · Score: 4, Insightful

keywords and phrases that match users' precise searches and to write in informal, accessible language.

The article also suggests that using the name is full form, repeatedly, and using keywords in your title makes it receive a higher rank of google news.

Yahoo news is filtered by people; google news is completely automated.

From porn to religion... from the left to the right... many groups have figured out how to manipulate search results. It's life or death in the web world to optimize, It's google's responsibility if they are going to deliver news that they deliver both sides of a story.

Re:It's google's job to give balanced news by Senjutsu · 2004-09-24 06:20 · Score: 3, Insightful

Google isn't reporting or delivering news. It is indexing those sites that do.

But if it wants to remain relevant, it needs to make sure it index those sites in such a way that a balanced presentation of respectable news sites are presented for a query. If the top stories continually run along the lines of "John Kerry is a Gay Commie Space Alien" just because some 2nd tier nutso conservative blog figured out how to best exploit the indexing algorithm, Google News will quickly become useless.
Re:It's google's job to give balanced news by Mornelithe · 2004-09-24 06:25 · Score: 2, Insightful

It's google's responsibility if they are going to deliver news that they deliver both sides of a story.

Since when has any news organization been concerned with reporting "both sides of a story"? Every news source puts their own spin on things based on however they lean and/or what will sell more copies.

If anything, Google's less likely to be biased than most places, since it just mechanically indexes things. If people are manipulating the results, then it might be in Google's interest to change the algorithm to keep the pretense of being neutral (and therefore not alienating its "readers").

I'm sure Google isn't trying to be biased, but if you think that delivering both sides of a story is part of some kind of Code of the Journalist (right along with "only report the whole truth"), you're dreaming.

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I've come for the woman, and your head.
Re:It's google's job to give balanced news by Fwonkas · 2004-09-24 09:17 · Score: 2, Insightful

Every news source puts their own spin on things based on however they lean and/or what will sell more copies.

...

I'm sure Google isn't trying to be biased, but if you think that delivering both sides of a story is part of some kind of Code of the Journalist (right along with "only report the whole truth"), you're dreaming.

Granted, a lot do put some spin on it. But I'd say that there's some that at least attempt to maintain some level of objectivity. No one's going to be 100% successful, of course. But to say that someone who holds that general expectation is dreaming is cynical.

I'm not sure what the Journalistic definition of objectivity is, but I certainly don't think it necessarily entails showing all perspectives ("both sides of a story") on a news item. Objectivity involves seeing, uninfluenced by external manipulation, something as it is. If that sometimes requires showing more than one take on a story, then fine.

Surely you would agree that, for example, the BBC is noticeably less biased than Fox News?

If anything, Google's less likely to be biased than most places, since it just mechanically indexes things.
This seems obvious. But I disagree. Being more democratic does not mean it's less biased or more objective. I guess it depends on whether bias is necessarily intentional. I'd argue that it isn't.

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COMPUTER! Whatever happened to Blueberry Muffin?

In other news... by grifter7 · 2004-09-24 05:47 · Score: 1, Insightful

...discovery made that Google is actually trying to profit from it's own tools...

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The bias is in american culture by SteroidMan · 2004-09-24 05:51 · Score: 2, Insightful

I mean look at US News and World Report which is probably the widest read news weekly. Look how straight-laced Kerry has had to go to even attempt to appeal to the Midwestern, Rust Belt, and Southern voters. The US, like it or not, is a very conservative country.

Re:The bias is in american culture by geoffspear · 2004-09-24 06:01 · Score: 5, Insightful

Only if "probably" means "definitely not".
Time and Newsweek both have significantly higher weekly circulation. US News doesn't even seem to try to hide its bias; it seems like the very first thing in every issue is an editorial expressing views slightly to the right of Karl Rove.

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Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
Re:The bias is in american culture by damiam · 2004-09-24 06:39 · Score: 2, Insightful

Kerry spends too much time vacationing? Have you seen Bush's schedule recently?

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It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Re:The bias is in american culture by Twirlip+of+the+Mists · 2004-09-24 07:11 · Score: 2, Insightful

US News doesn't even seem to try to hide its bias

Which is one of the great things about it. (Not to say that it's a great magazine. I don't read it that often myself, so I wouldn't know.)

Everybody has a bias. Everybody has political leanings. The idea of "objective journalism" is a very new one, only cooked up since the 1950's. The problem with "objective journalism" is that it's inherently impossible. Not just because all people have biases, but because the way "objective journalism" has been concocted is doomed to failure.

A tenet of the "objective journalism" philosophy is that all stories should cover both sides of the issue at hand. If the story is about the fact that Person X says that Thing A is bad, then the story also has to include a mention of the fact that Person Y says that Thing A is good. That's the rule.

But this approach usually ends up portraying a false equivalence. It sends the message that Person X and Person Y are equivalent in every way, and that neither point of view has any merit over the other. This leads to the kinds of absurdities like we saw last year before the invasion of Iraq. Every news story about the preparations for the invasion also included a mention of the fact that people protested the invasion. But they failed to deliver the proper perspective: that the people protesting the war were few in number and insidious in motive. The coverage, therefore, ended up legitimizing the protesters when it should not have.

"Protesters marched today" is not news. It doesn't begin to approach the standard for news. In order to be news, you have to tell who did it and why. Who protested? Members of the radical leftist revolutionary group International Answer. Why? To show their support for Saddam Hussein. These are key facts, but "objective journalism" requires them to be omitted.

Now, there's good news and there's bad news. The good news is that journalists often ignore the "objective journalism" philosophy when covering their stories. They often do what "objective journalism" expressly prohibits, injecting perspective and context into their stories. This is a good thing.

The bad news, however, is that journalists do not do this all the time. They do it when they feel like it. So a Klan rally, for example, gets covered as "Klan members marched in opposition to civil rights today." This is good. But an anti-war protest gets covered as "Protesters marched today," which is bad bad bad.

Whenever a news outlet, like a newspaper or a magazine, rejects "objective journalism" and covers news events with context and perspective, this is good. Whenever a news outlet purports to hold to the value of "objective journalism" but covers events with context and perspective anyway, this is bad.

If the New York Times would drop the silly pretense of being the "newspaper of record" and simply declare itself to be what it already is --a liberal newspaper --then everything would be fine. People looking for a liberal perspective can read the Times. People looking for a conservative perspective can read the Journal. And people looking for balance can --get this --read both.

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I write in my journal
Re:The bias is in american culture by nwbvt · 2004-09-24 07:25 · Score: 2, Insightful

All newspapers are not equal. For instance the Washington Times does not have nearly the same readership as the Washington Post.

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Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.

It is not Googles responsibility by cbelle13013 · 2004-09-24 05:51 · Score: 3, Insightful

I'm mildly confused how something automated can have a "conservative leaning" when people aren't doing the crawling.

No, its not going to crawl through a Ih8tebu5h's livejournal entry for 'news' or other blogger oriented 'news'.

Wasn't there a slashdot article a while ago about Google having a seperate section for bloggers so they didn't skew news? Not that all bloggers are liberal, but most of the internet savvy folks I've met are.

Re:It is not Googles responsibility by Zebbers · 2004-09-24 06:10 · Score: 3, Insightful

Some human coded it somewhere down the line.
Re:It is not Googles responsibility by Bearpaw · 2004-09-24 06:19 · Score: 2, Insightful

I'm mildly confused how something automated can have a "conservative leaning" when people aren't doing the crawling.
It's possible because the leaning doesn't have to be intentional. (At least not on Google's part.) It could be an accidental result of how their code works, and/or it could be a result of the system being intentionally gamed by people trying to skew Google's results.
Re:It is not Googles responsibility by LMCBoy · 2004-09-24 06:34 · Score: 4, Insightful

No, its not going to crawl through a Ih8tebu5h's livejournal entry for 'news' or other blogger oriented 'news'.

No, the article shows that Google News *does* use popular blogs in its results; in fact that's the whole point of the story: that searching for "John Kerry" on Google News presents you with an inordinate number of anti-Kerry rants on conservative blogs, rather than the "mainstream" news results that you get when searching for "George Bush".

The article doesn't try to infer some kind of conspiracy from this; rather, it's probably due to the fact that bloggers typically repeat the full name throughout their articles ("John Kerry is unfit for command! John Kerry is flippity-floppity, and John Kerry speaks French!"), whereas actual news articles tend to revert to "Mr. Kerry" or simply "Kerry". It is mildly interesting that GN indexes these political blogs, though.

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Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
Re:It is not Googles responsibility by LostCluster · 2004-09-24 06:41 · Score: 4, Insightful

The basic problem forming in the media right now is that there's two distinct flavors:

News reports try to be fair... but the people who do such reporting tend to altruistic people who have a hard-to-hide bias towards the left, always wanting to file a feel-bad-for-this-person report that paints the little guy as a victim and the big company as the bad guy.

Then there's news analysis... that usually lands on the right because the best bigmouths tend to be right-wingers. Even if you disagree with every word they say, they're still more fun to listen two than a left-winger. Fox News Channel frequently has one-from-the-left, one-from-the-right debates on their air, and the right-winger usually is able to talk in soundbytes and talk over the opponent to the point that they appear to "win" the debate more often.

Here's what throws Google for the loop... There's only one AP, and there's only one Reuters. Stories that come out of those two agencies appear in hundreds of web pages, yet there are hundreds of right-wing opinon writers who all express similar ideas in completely different words. Therefore, the right-wing opinion pages sometimes can drown out the left-wing reporting by simply having more entries in the list.

So.... by cr0y · 2004-09-24 05:51 · Score: 3, Insightful

Not trying to troll here, I don't understand why people are trying to call shinanigans on Google, if they have a bias then that is their right to. If you do not like the services they are providing then don't use it. It's not like they are slandering anyone or posting false headlines.

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ItWasFree.com - Take the mystery

Re:So.... by stratjakt · 2004-09-24 05:53 · Score: 5, Insightful

It's a percieved conservative bias, not a liberal one. That's the "problem".

Bias is okee-fine, so long as your bias and my bias are the same.

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I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Re:So.... by revscat · 2004-09-24 05:55 · Score: 4, Insightful

Not trying to troll here, I don't understand why people are trying to call shinanigans on Google, if they have a bias then that is their right to.
Sure, but if they paint themselves as being equananimous in their presentation then they should be held up to that standard, and criticized when they don't meet up to it. If they want to be biased one way or another then so be it, but they should be upfront about it. It's like Fox; it's not so much the fact that they are conservative I disagree with, it is that they are dishonest in saying they are fair. I actually subscribe to a couple of conservative magazines because of their quality, but they do not deny or try to hide their slant.
To put it another way: Lying is wrong.
Re:So.... by maxpublic · 2004-09-24 06:11 · Score: 2, Insightful

That would depend on what you define as 'fair' or 'biased'. Seems to me that most folks define 'fair' as "whatever I happen to agree with", and 'biased' as "whatever I happen to disagree with"; and that includes the so-called liberals as much as the so-called conservatives.

As a small-l libertarian I don't see much in the way of unbiased news regardless of the source. The very assumptions that most stories are based on are biased in and of themselves, even if the piece is written in the most unbiased manner possible. Example: both the left and the right operate on the assumption that forced government schooling is a good thing, and only argue about how this schooling should be executed. Neither side ever questions the concept of forced government schooling itself, and the media (regardless of whether you class it as 'left' or 'right') also supports the idea of forced government schooling by adopting the assumption without question.

This happens all the time, over a vast array of subjects. Very few people ever question the concepts themselves, just the manner in which those concepts are implemented. From my point of view, any news article which jumps on the bandwagon is biased from the outset and cannot be said to be 'fair' or 'balanced' in any way at all.

It's also one of the reasons I see so little difference between the Democrats and the Republicans. They may quibble over the details but they agree whole-heartedly on all the major points. What good is having two parties when neither of them wants to examine the fundamental assumptions of the system they operate in, much less do anything to change that system in any marked way? The states goals of both parties are so closely in line with one another that it's often difficult to see any real difference. The trivialities are played up to *seem* like big differences, but both parties like things just the way they are and will never work to rock the boat that they both profit from.

Google isn't to blame for any perceived bias; Google can't help but be biased, just like all the other news organizations out there. It's a part of the game and I doubt they even realize that bias is inherent to the system, so long as they never question the system itself.

Max

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My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Re:So.... by TheFlyingGoat · 2004-09-24 06:25 · Score: 5, Insightful

Exactly. How many people are complaining that Slashdot slants to the left? I'm a card-carrying Republican and once in a while it annoys me, but I'm smart enough to ignore the bias and just look at the facts. Same goes if I watch Fox News. I would assume most other Slashdot readers are the same.

Our local newspaper (the Milwaukee Journal) is awful when it comes to being liberally slanted, and while the conservatively slanted public radio shows often try pointing out the bias, it's just ignored by the newspaper and the public. There is NO unbiased news. That's just something we have to live with.

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You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
Re:So.... by TheFlyingGoat · 2004-09-24 06:34 · Score: 1, Insightful

So do you watch CNN? How about CBS? NBC? Read The New York Times? Slashdot? Every news outlet is slanted one way or another, it's just a matter of how subtly they do it.

As I said in another post, The Milwaukee Journal often uses AP stories which seem to be very well balanced, but then will exclude certain paragraphs they deem unnecessary, or filler, and the articles end up having a liberal slant.

Also, if you get on Fox's case, you need to get on CBS's as well, since they both claim to provide balanced news and offer biased news instead. The media bias is annoying, which is why I read liberal papers (Milwaukee Journal, NY Times, cnn.com) and watch liberal news shows (NBC, ABC, CBS) but listen to conservative radio.

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You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill

This just in... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-09-24 05:52 · Score: 4, Insightful

i) world saturated with unreadable political blogs, many right wing.
ii) man who is actually President gets more genuine international news coverage (speeches, commentary, policy, state visits and campaigning) than man who isn't (basically just campaigning).

Thus aforementioned blogs tend to show up prominently in News digests about non-President, because there isn't much to say about him.

/ ~Rocket Science

Article text has excellent theory. by mopslik · 2004-09-24 05:54 · Score: 5, Insightful

"I think what you're seeing is an odd little linguistic artifact," said Zuckerman, former vice president of Tripod.com and now a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society who studies search engines. The chief culprit, he theorized, is that mainstream news publications refer to the senator on second reference as Kerry, while alternative news sites often use the phrase "John Kerry" multiple times, for effect or derision. To Google News' eye, that's a more exact search result.

Seems reasonable enough to me. Most of the major news I catch does indeed refer to Kerry without his first name. Likewise for Bush.

Hardly an intentional bias.

News Flash: There is no unbiased news by chia_monkey · 2004-09-24 06:05 · Score: 4, Insightful

Sorry to burst anyone's bubble, but there is no unbiased news anymore. The media...print, radio, online...is mostly controlled by a few of the major conglomerates. Not only that, but they all have their slants on what is reported and how it is reported. Here's an interested quote from WSJ Opinion Journal

"The chairman of the entertainment giant Viacom said the reason was simple: Republican values are what U.S. companies need."

It's nice to know the media is deciding what to let through and what to report "in our best interest".

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"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang

Our polarized society is the problem by humuhumunukunukuapu' · 2004-09-24 06:05 · Score: 4, Insightful

This is just a reflection of how polarized our society has become; it was accelerated post 1994, and 9/11 -> Iraq has sent it around the moon and back again.

The article really just re-enforces my thought that it doesn't really matter what news source you read at any point in time, as long as you are reading many different sources on every side of an issue [to the extent possible]. Then you can settle on the truth being somewhere in the middle.

but this is just bullsh!t no matter which side you are on:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/09/24/politics /main645393.shtml

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i saw the baby, and the baby looked at me

Beta? by dema · 2004-09-24 06:05 · Score: 2, Insightful

In defensive of Goolgle, Google is still considered beta, even if it has been so for a quite a while.

I realize it's anecdotal, but by switcha · 2004-09-24 06:12 · Score: 3, Insightful

I just did a search for each, and Kerry's was pretty much down the line (pos/neg), while "George Bush" yielded four hits out of ten in the first list just from dailyKos.com, a, by any standards, rampant Bush-bashing blog. Actually, I briefly scanned the articles and only 2 were neutral/positive for Bush.

Apparently, it falls the other way as well, but the very fact that a blog on either extreme of the spectrum is showing up that much is a little disconcerting.

Punditry of all stripes is great and I read a ton of them from both camps regularly, but I come to Google News for news, not the OpEd page.

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You know what? ... A little club soda *did* get that out!

I have a simpler explanation by Otter · 2004-09-24 06:12 · Score: 5, Insightful

This isn't about optimizing, it isn't about bias at Google, it isn't explained by ritually invoking the evil spectre of Fox News...

The "second tier" conservative sites write positive things about George Bush and negative things about John Kerry. The analogous liberal/left sites (who don't seem to rate sneering comments about their importance) write negative things about George Bush but have zero positive enthusiasm for Kerry. Therefore, "George Bush" gets both pro and con results; "John Kerry" only gets con. No conspiracy required, just an uninspiring candidate.

You can see the same thing, by the way, on bumpers. Here in John Kerry's home state, there are a zillion anti-Bush bumper stickers and about as many pro-Bush stickers as pro-Kerry stickers. Are cars optimizing their bumpers for my eyes?

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What I'm listening to now on Pandora...

Google-like Systems Need to Understand Expertise by ctwxman · 2004-09-24 06:18 · Score: 4, Insightful

One of the biggest shortcomings of the Google News method is not taking into account the source's expertise, implied or otherwise. For instance, domestic US stories are often headlined using Xinhua or The Scotsman as the lead source. It would seem that you will get more detail and understanding from a source closer to the story, or specializing in the story's subject. A Connecticut newspaper or TV station is going to give me more detail and perspective on a story taking place here than someone far away. This weekend, this headline was featured on Google News (I wrote about this in my blog, so I have it at hand): The Sopranos buries the competition. That's a valid story in entertainment news, but the source was, "The Scotsman - Scotland's National Newspaper Online." The next listing was for the Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) followed by ABC News and Planet Out. Truth is, as interesting a tool as Google News is, we still need editors and reporters to weigh facts and sources and see inherent weakness or bias in what is often passed off as complete and balanced facts.

Sounds fishy by Asprin · 2004-09-24 06:22 · Score: 3, Insightful

What are the odds that the political landscape Google is surveying actually is more conservative than OJR thinks? If they detected a difference between the sites which use human editors and the Google aggregators which do not, what are they really measuring here - the biases of the Google algorithms or the biases of the other human editors? Correct me if I'm wrong, but Google only knows what it finds.

Just a hunch, but I bet these guys are still trying to figger out why Fox News is so dang-ole popular.

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"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie

umm.. by helix400 · 2004-09-24 06:27 · Score: 4, Insightful

Conservative bias in Google news? It's just an aggregate..it picks up news from all sides of the spectrum. Because of that, it also displays left leaning sites like Salon, and extreme left-leaning blogs such as dailykos.com.

But then, I suspect the reason this article was approved is because it appeals to michael's left leaning bias, which he unapologetically admits he has. As he said: "I'm trying to dispel all notion that I'm unbiased, or that I'll be presenting everything in an entirely unbiased fashion. If my biases totally offend you, you might want to go right now to your user preferences and check the box to block stories posted by me."

Re:umm.. by Anonymous Coward · 2004-09-24 06:32 · Score: 0, Insightful

Liberals are better than rethuglicans anyways. Now if only the americans actually had a real liberal, left wing party...

Potential is key by follower_of_christ · 2004-09-24 06:51 · Score: 4, Insightful

Today, the Online Journalism Review details a potential conservative bias in the site's algorithm

Conservatives probably see articles like the following and start sniffing around for conspiracy. Whether a conspiracy exists or not. I'm starting to see a common thread amongst conservatives of boycotting orginizations that even hint liberal ideals. As a conservative myself I see a large movement away from the major media by most of my conservative friends around the nation and world due to "media bias" and its presentation of liberal ideals. (I'm probably redudant here.)
The advent of the internet, blogs, and talk radio allow this to happen. It saddens me because I feel that there hasn't been substantive debate in over a decade because both "new" and "old" media has bias and both camps are clinging on to the media that shares their views and shuns out the opposition.

I'm longing to have a healthy debate about issues rather than a shouting match where both people leave mad feeling more "right" than when they began.

Article
Article

The job is to make money by JohnnyNoSPAM · 2004-09-24 07:08 · Score: 2, Insightful

Actually, Google is a business. It's Google job to make money. How they may money or how much money they make depends on the product that they offer and how the public takes to its quality. If people like what they see, then the business can be profitable. If people do not like it, then other news sites will get Google's former business.

One aspect of being profitable is to keep costs down. This includes labor costs. If a computer algorithm can perform a job adequately and for less money than a human (considering that the person will need to be paid + benefits), then from an economic point of view, it makes sense. However, Google should perhaps have a small human team. This investment would allow for the human-aspect of quality assurance - to catch stuff that even the most sophisticated of algorithms cannot catch - and thus could improve quality thereby keeping more or attracting more of an audience allowing for the opportunity to make more money. A human QA professional might be more able to catch things like when lobbyists or whoever try to take advantage of how a system operates and then (at the least) attempts to abuse and/or corrupt the system to fulfill their own agendas.

At any rate, Google did allow for an open look at their news search engine. This is good. I hope that Google will use this feedback objectively to improve their service.

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Get some.

Re:Google-like Systems Need to Understand Expertis by Once&FutureRocketman · 2004-09-24 07:20 · Score: 3, Insightful

I don't disagree that it would be useful if their algorithm had some effective way of separating the cluefull from the clueless. However, your statement that

It would seem that you will get more detail and understanding from a source closer to the story, or specializing in the story's subject.

is not to be taken for granted. In particular, it is often the case that foreign reporting of domesitic issues is more balanced and useful than what we get from American news sources.
Particularly under this latest administration.

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"Research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." -- Wernher von Braun

Conservative Bias? by nwbvt · 2004-09-24 07:21 · Score: 3, Insightful

Lets, the first 25 of todays results for news searches on George W Bush and John Kerry:

Bush: 17 negative headlines
Kerry: 6 negative headlines
(For the record, I am not reading each and every article, just counting it if the headline appears to be negative. Also, I am also counting headlines that bash both candidates as negative).

Sorry folks, I don't see the 'conservative bias'. Granted one would probably expect a few more negative results with regard to the current president regardless of which party is in office, today Bush had nearly three times as many.

No, I'm not arguing that Google news always has a liberal bias (it uses algorithms, not editors, to decide what to post), just that finding a few conservative-leaning headlines after a few experiments (they only loosely document two, though they claim there were others) is not evidence of a conservative bias.

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Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.

Of course backlinks aren't used for news by Flexagon · 2004-09-24 08:28 · Score: 3, Insightful

Turns out that on Google News, backlinks do *not* improve search positioning.

Seems quite reasonable. After all, being news, how is it going to have many backlinks? And how are they all going to be found while the news is still new? By the time the news is old enough to appear in Google's regular results, backlinks become useful. Am I missing something?

Re:Definitely a troll by Concerned+Onlooker · 2004-09-24 08:32 · Score: 3, Insightful

The group International Answer does exist but their agenda does not seem to be to support Saddam Hussein, as the parent would suggest. They may not even be radical leftists.

A thing may indeed be impossible to achieve, but that does not mean one should not attempt it anyway. I don't think we'd be well served to go back to the yellow journalism days. Thompson's Gonzo journalistic style--which is really just a first person narrative or even documentary--has a place but there are those of use who want a more complete perspective.

This does not mean getting exact opposite pieces of information from both sides. It means getting both sides to comment on a topic.

Aiming for a high standard but not reaching it is better in my mind than aiming for a low standard and hitting your mark.

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http://www.rootstrikers.org/

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