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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."
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.
And so the circle is complete. People will now start to attack and slander a once good service, because, hey, it's had its good run. I for one welcome our new evilmegaglobecorp, Google.
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
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.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
"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.
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.
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.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
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".
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
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.
s /main645393.shtml
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/politic
i saw the baby, and the baby looked at me
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
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?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
No. All media has a liberal bias. I saw it on Fox (which also has a liberal bias, being part of the evil monolithic media itself.)
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
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.
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.
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
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.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
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."
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.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
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.
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.
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