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Mapping Google News

Posted by timothy on from the that-hansel-he's-so-hot-right-now dept.

CousinLarry writes "A neat project called Buzztracker.org has been mining Google News for over a year and keeping track of relationships between geographic locations mentioned in articles. The results are some really cool maps that actually seem to reflect the "buzz" of the day - check out the Vatican clusters from earlier this month, or the global New Year's chatter. You can also dig down into the articles from which the maps were generated."

10 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. Re:MetaWeb by winkydink · · Score: 4, Insightful

    SEMANTIC WEB!

    Thank you Tim (Berners-Lee) Didn't know you were a /. reader. The question remains, while it's very interesting (and cool), what does one do with the aggregated data?

    --

    "I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey

  2. Can't say I'm surprised. by CSMastermind · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Well when you think about it aren't those the exact places you'd expect to be hotspots?

    1. Re:Can't say I'm surprised. by alphan · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Well when you think about it aren't those the exact places you'd expect to be hotspots?

      It is good that you could expect that. For me, there are a lot of different factors that add to complexity. Neutrality of Google being one, the fact that Google News is in English being another.

    2. Re:Can't say I'm surprised. by jonno317 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Well, actually if you look at the bottom of google news you'll notice that it's in 21 languages other than English (counting Canadian English, Australian English, and the like as separate languages...so maybe a few less than that technically). But I'd say that Google is in enough other major languages to not be considered biased (at least as far as languages are concerned). If buzztracker.org is biased toward English, then I would say it's because of their choices and no fault of Google.

  3. That's cool by Red+Moose · · Score: 3, Insightful
    That is finally some news for nerds. About fucking time.

    What a cool site, and it works very quickly and is not overflowing with advertising crap?

    --

    Acting stupid isn't much fun when there's someone around who knows better

  4. BuzzTracker? by Storlek · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Apparently they didn't Google their own name, or else they would've noticed the name was already in use for a fairly popular music composition program.

    --
    Bears don't normally eat things that talk and move backwards.
  5. Really cool but suffers from a common problem... by terraformer · · Score: 4, Insightful
    That being one level of hierarchy to display complex data. China (Top with .09%) is top dog because all international press refer to china as a whole and fails to reference individual places in china (ie; Guangdong Province) despite the sheer size of the country. Therefore, China is over represented when looking at news. However, in the case of Gaza (the second highest at .08%), the exact opposite occurs where Gaza steals all of the thunder from the larger Palestinian issue (Gaza is one of two territories in question and is not in Palestine, the place where all of the problems in the middle east originates from).

    If, they represented this in hierarchical format, the middle east would dominate by picking up points from children Gaza, West Bank and Palestine (not to mention Iraq). Baghdad is probably a good example here. How much actually happens in areas outside of Baghdad proper but gets labled baghdad anyhow.

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    Who are you? The new #2 Who is #1? You are #617565. I am not a number, I am a free man! Muhahaha.
  6. Chasing the Pack (and running from it) by doom · · Score: 3, Insightful
    What I like about google news is that it's an incredibly easy way of keeping an eye on what has been called the "pack journalism" problem. Just as an example, trying doing a google news search on "Count Every Vote Act": that's consistently turned up less than 100 hits since it was announced. Is there some reason it's not newsworthy? Similarly, when the Ohio recount thing was going down last year, it took *forever* for it to punch through as a top-level story. Evidentally the pattern is something like a story is dead until the AP Wire runs it, and then a thousand other news "sources" pick it up.

    I've had the thought that it might be cool to implement an anti-news site that would do something like show you links to New York Times stories that have never been referenced by the top page of Google News.

  7. Nov 3rd? Dec 26? by mzieg · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I have to question the results a bit. Look at the archive for November 2004, especially around Nov 3rd . Anyone remember any "buzz" about Ohio? Maybe a Florida 2000 reprisal? "Battleground States," anyone? That was a hugely geographic news event, and it doesn't even register on their chart. Likewise, Sumatra barely merits a blip on Dec 26. I'm not sure I'm buying this.

    What we have here is one computer algorithm aggregating another computer algorithm's assessment of "newsworthy," with no provision for hindsight or fluff-vs-historical weighting. It's a neat idea, and the graphics are pretty slick, but I don't see any real value here.

  8. Re:Nov 3rd? Dec 26? by Random+Chaos · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I understand your point, however I think it is partially based on a false premise: In reguard to Nov 3rd. The site tracks cities, not states.

    After checking Dec 26, 27, 28, and 29th they do have Indonesia, but it doesn't show up until the 28th (and then under Jakarta only). I would guess this is due to them not having Sumatra or Banda Aceh in their keyword search system.

    I also notice that most cities in the US other then Washington and New York seem to almost never show up - could it be that their "selection of articles" is a bit limited (refering to the above's 2nd paragraph)?