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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."

5 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. 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.

  3. 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.

    --
    Who are you? The new #2 Who is #1? You are #617565. I am not a number, I am a free man! Muhahaha.
  4. 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.

  5. 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.