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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."
This manipulation would never happen in the mainstream media.
Regards,
Dan Rather
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?
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.
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.
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.
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