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Optimizing News Sites For Google News
malibucreek writes "More trouble for Google News? Yesterday, it was Google News censoring stories for China. Today, the Online Journalism Review details a potential conservative bias in the site's algorithm for news search results. The story also includes some details about how Google ranks stories on its news page. Turns out that on Google News, backlinks do *not* improve search positioning."
However, the question becomes, is Google actually serving news? I honestly don't know. They are basically doing screen scraping (or RSS feeds) to display topics from other sites. Does this consitute serving news? Tough to say. Obviously the content is current events, however, Google doesn't write any of the content. Where does their responsibility lie?
Google isn't reporting or delivering news. It is indexing those sites that do.
... the bigger the company or the more controversial the news, the bigger they change in their symbol. That doesn't mean it is relevant to me or that there is not more important news out there.
I don't see Google as the place to go when I want to find out what is happening today. I find it the place to go when I read a blurb on one news site and want to get more details or an alternate view from another site.
It would be like using a stock exchange ticker to decide what company is making news
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
So now they are IPO'd it seems they are under a different microscope.
Pre-IPO couple of college kids that worked hard and are smart and made the world better.
Post-IPO, this company is the new MS, look at all the sinister, conspiring things they do, always knew they were no good.
Whats next Google supports terrorism? I guess whatever sells papers or click throughs.
People are damned cynical. I think that Google will be recieving a lot of flak in the future for doing what it should do as a company: make a profit. If leaning towards the right makes them a buck, then I find it hard to believe they'd do otherwise. It may not be right, but it is their right.
If you actually RTFA, you'll see the real reason burried a little more than half way down:
"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.
Basically, google is doing exactly what we told it too: looking for the most links with 'john kerry' in it.
"Computers are out to destroy us. This can be proven by the fact that they do exactly what we tell them."
Zapman
Obviously the content is current events, however, Google doesn't write any of the content. Where does their responsibility lie?
It's really simple; hell, it's even in the subject you're responding to. As a news aggregate, just as with a search engine, bias is a bad thing for Google. I run an aggregate of my own (plug, plug :-), and the very idea that I should favor one site over another (aside from the stated goal of who gives a more timely announcement) is completely bankrupt of any ethical responsibility my site has to it's users.
The old standard of "appearance of impropriety" holds at least as well for Google, too. Same is true for Slashdot article selection. If anyone is getting kickbacks or has some other unstated criteria for selection, that is irresponsible and should not be tolerated. If it's just a bug in their code, a fix will keep their reputation intact. If it's intended at any level, it just gets added to the scorecard that people have started due to questionable action as of late on Google's part.
It's a tough call to say what's "balanced". A rather crude method is to say "50-50". But that doesn't take into account the "fringe" parties, independants, etc. Should all candidates be given equal airtime? Personally, I don't think that would be ideal - I really could care less about hearing about most of the other candidates.
Suppose, then, we come up with some sort of hand-waving idea of balanced being relative to the vote that each candidate will receive. Ignoring for a minute the obvious time-continuity issues, this would definitely be keeping the fringe to the fringe, but with the obvious downside of forcing a two-party system. No one else will get enough airtime to warrant voting, keeping them perpetually on the outside of the electoral process.
Maybe what we really want is "unbiased"? Report all the news, all sides, and let the populace decide. Sounds reasonable - even though some^Wmost voters will ignore the information, it's their choice to be uninformed, rather than the news outets' choice. There would be two ways about this: first, you can just take all the press releases and release that as news (the easy way), or you can research and look for all sides (the hard way). Which one do you think most people would do? Yeah. And if you do research, inevitably, you'll find some sides utterly unbelievable, and fail to report them in an unbiased manner, if you report them at all.
Short version: easier said than done, I think.
Not to mention--but I couldn't find the source--that I think over 50% of newspapers endorsed Bush in 2000.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Google just searches and indexes the web, it's news index has a few additional filters for lameness, so it's obvious to me if users are searching for terms, that the reputable newss providers aren't using they will come up short on the ranking; and are probably a little bit out-of-touch with their readers. Publishing on the web is different than publishing in print and the media is going to have to learn.
All of us geeks have just learned how to search on google news to get a ballanced index, search for "kerry" + "john kerry" that's all
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