Google to use TrustRank for News, Possibly More

mike slaven writes "In a follow-up to Tuesday's post about Google registering a trademark on the term TrustRank, an article on NewScientist explains how Google plans to track the credibility of news sources. The article also mentions that the patent on TrustRank is not limited to ranking just news stories: 'The patent also reveals that the same system could be roped in to rank other search results, not simply news. So sales and services could in the future be listed on the basis of price and the reputation of the company involved.'"

Comments

I see problems coming if Google uses trust rank

[DeadSea]

From what I have read about trust rank, the basic premise is that they pick 200 or so "trusted sites". The trust rank for any page is then basically the number of link hops to the page from a trusted site.

The problem I have with this is that there are many problems with identifying trusted sites and maintaining the trustworthiness of such sites after they have been chosen.

From Google's point of view, a trusted site would have to have strict editorial standards and link to a lot of sites. I can think of a lot of sites with strict editorial content, but they generally do not link to a lot of sites. The open directory projects seems to me to be a candidate for a trusted site. It has editorial controls and links to a heck of a lot of sites.

The first question to ask is: "After the trusted sites is chosen, how much would it cost to buy one?". I suppose dmoz itself would be hard to buy outright, but how much would it take to buy one of the editors, or to buy an editorial position? Probably not much. Dmoz alread has a lot of editorial fraud and it would make the problem worse. I'm not sure that its fair to expect trusted sites not to degrade to some extent.

The second question to ask is: "How hard is it to buy links from trusted sites?". The answer has to be that it is pretty easy. Forget about corrupting the people as I discussed in the last point. Any trusted site that links to lots of pages is going to have a huge link management problem. Every day hundreds of domains that it links to may expire. You can snap those up and buy trust.

All this doesn't even include folks who make sites look trustworthy with the sole intention of turning them to the dark side later. All of this happens currently with pagerank, but it will be much worse once the trust power is put into the hands of a few.

--
Exchange Rate Currency Calculator

Re:I see problems coming if Google uses trust rank

[MankyD]

Interesting points, but I find it hard to believe that Google, (or any other competent company implementing something like this,) hasn't had the forethought to avoid these pitfalls. We still don't know entirely how trust rank works, mind you.

Re:I see problems coming if Google uses trust rank

[Psiolent]

The open directory projects seems to me to be a candidate for a trusted site.

You know, that's exactly what I thought, too. In fact I can't think of a better site to use. Being an open directory editor myself, I'm pretty familiar with the rules and guidelines for editors, and, let me tell you, the open directory people take what they do very seriously. Of course, you'd really want to have multiple directories like this to really utilize Trust Rank.

Re:I see problems coming if Google uses trust rank

[Psiolent]

I find it hard to believe that Google, (or any other competent company implementing something like this,) hasn't had the forethought to avoid these pitfalls.

I don't know, it seems like making an assumption like that is not really a good idea. I think a company like Google certainly has shown competent decision making in the past, but we should never accept something at face value just because of an apparent pattern of competence. Question everything!

Re:I see problems coming if Google uses trust rank

[Anonymous Coward]

Question everything!

I question the legitimacy of your website. Everything I looked at eventually lead me to a blank website that said "test" with a hop.clickbank.net URL.

very nice.

Re:I see problems coming if Google uses trust rank

[Chyeld]

Simple solution, don't publish who you trust, just publish the results.

Re:I see problems coming if Google uses trust rank

[twbecker]

From what I have read about trust rank, the basic premise is that they pick 200 or so "trusted sites". The trust rank for any page is then basically the number of link hops to the page from a trusted site.

I was gonna mod you down, but I'll post instead. If you'd have RTFA, you'd have seen that the above statement is totally false. There are lots of criteria they are using to generate the number, of which internet traffic is only 1. To quote TFA:
he database will be built by continually monitoring the number of stories from all news sources, along with average story length, number with bylines, and number of the bureaux cited, along with how long they have been in business. Google's database will also keep track of the number of staff a news source employs, the volume of internet traffic to its website and the number of countries accessing the site.

Google will take all these parameters, weight them according to formulae it is constructing, and distil them down to create a single value. This number will then be used to rank the results of any news search.

Re:I see problems coming if Google uses trust rank

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

All Bullshit.

It means that CBS News and MSNBC get a heavy "trust" rating, while Juan Cole, tomflocco.com or Scoop.nz get "Le Shafte".

More coprorate sponsored media is not why I click. This is Google being used to "mainstream" the Internet as an information source - which is now a loose cannon in the world of controlled messages. Millions, just hearing about "'blogs on the Innernets" for the first time will now be safely served "more of the same" - while having alternative messages and analysis spun away with "low-trust".

Don't Be Evil, my ass.
You want the real truth on "trustworthy" news sources from Google? Search for "The Mighty Wurlitzer"+CIA or "Project Mockingbird".

Re:I see problems coming if Google uses trust rank

[Anonymous Coward]

You want the real truth on "trustworthy" news sources from Google? Search for "The Mighty Wurlitzer"+CIA or "Project Mockingbird".

Lord knows I expect nothing but "the truth" from a guy called "The Mighty Wurlitzer".

Re:I see problems coming if Google uses trust rank

[smittyoneeach]

Will the internet increase the turnover frequency, as all DBE sources go PHB, to be replaced by "untainted" ones?
Or will the PHB outfits reach an Infinite Diabolical Regress (IDR), where TLAs are AFU, too?
It's the Information Age, yet the Combine's fog machine obscures more and more...

Re:I see problems coming if Google uses trust rank

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

I got TLAs OFA! (Out my F****** A**) ;-)

Re:I see problems coming if Google uses trust rank

[smittyoneeach]

So, if the TLA is Obviously Fscked Up, does that make it TOFU?
I worry about stuff like that...

Re:I see problems coming if Google uses trust rank

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

You will not be able to stay home, brother.
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out.
You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip,
Skip out for beer during commercials,
Because the revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox
In 4 parts without commercial interruptions.
The revolution will not show you pictures of Nixon blowing a bugle and leading a charge by John Mitchell, General Abrams and Spiro Agnew to eat hog maws confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary.
The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be brought to you by the Schaefer Award Theatre and will not star Natalie Woods and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle and Julia.
The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal.
The revolution will not get rid of the nubs.
The revolution will not make you look five pounds thinner, because the revolution will not be televised, Brother.

There will be no pictures of you and Willie May pushing that shopping cart down the block on the dead run,
or trying to slide that color television into a stolen ambulance.
NBC will not be able predict the winner at 8:32 or report from 29 districts.
The revolution will not be televised.

There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down brothers in the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down brothers in the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of Whitney Young being run out of Harlem on a rail with a brand new process.
There will be no slow motion or still life of Roy Wilkens strolling through Watts in a Red, Black and
Green liberation jumpsuit that he had been saving For just the proper occasion.

Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville Junction will no longer be so damned relevant, and
women will not care if Dick finally gets down with Jane on Search for Tomorrow because Black people will be in the street looking for a brighter day.
The revolution will not be televised.

There will be no highlights on the eleven o'clock news and no pictures of hairy armed women liberationists and Jackie Onassis blowing her nose.
The theme song will not be written by Jim Webb, Francis Scott Key, nor sung by Glen Campbell, Tom Jones, Johnny Cash, Englebert Humperdink, or the Rare Earth.
The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be right back after a message bbout a white tornado, white lightning, or white people.
You will not have to worry about a dove in your bedroom, a tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl.
The revolution will not go better with Coke.
The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath.
The revolution will put you in the driver's seat.

The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised, will not be televised, will not be televised. The revolution will be no re-run brothers; The revolution will be live.

Re:I see problems coming if Google uses trust rank

[Shotgun]

Which is even worse that just picking 200 or so 'trusted sites'.

Time and again, important news stories put out through blogs are ignored by the big companies with lots of 'reporters' and lots of stories regurgitated from the AP newswire.

This is nothing more than an idiotic push for more 'corporate' news in an attempt to drown out the smaller people.

Re:I see problems coming if Google uses trust rank

[Eternally optimistic]

There seems to me a fundamental problem with a single number for this purpose. Some sources are low-trust because the are unknowns, others because the have an established agenda, still others because they are habitually dishonest. Even worse, say you have the number 1 quality source about disk drives, do you now trust them about gardening tips?

Re:I see problems coming if Google uses trust rank

[cybermage]

If these factors (as mentioned in TFA) are the only factors, I think Google will placing a greater emphasis on (large|corporate) sites:

average story length

This one is probably most up for grabs -- although we'll have to see if the formula prefers longer or shorter stories.

number with bylines

This too is up for grabs. Certainly a willingness to put your name on a story helps for credibility.

number of the bureaux cited

This certainly favors (large|corporate) organizations. A news source that sites many sources will tend to either have staffed those themselves or can afford to pay for those sources.

how long they have been in business

Hopefully this won't be too great a factor. This will heavily favor giant print media and severly punish Web firms.

number of staff a news source employs

This will, by definition, punish the little guy. More good news for the print guys though.

volume of internet traffic to its website

Umm, can you say "the rich getting richer"? Should monkey-see, monkey-do really be a criteria? Plus, more traffic most likely means bookmarks. I have the BBC bookmarked and browse their headlines/articles sometimes four times a day. If I go searching for news, I'm not really interested in BBC results.

number of countries accessing the site

This is probably the most interesting criteria in terms of the effect it will have. It should have a really interesting impact on CNN. If this criteria is heavily weighted, CNN may have to rethink their whole policy of segregating visitors into different domains based on where they're reading the site from. Still, it can only serve to promote bigger sites at the expense of smaller ones.

What I find interesting is the criteria they leave out:

While news stories are too new to achieve much in terms of page rank, one indicator of Trust might be the factor in the number of links into the news source's domain from non-news sources.

Editorial Bias is another interesting factor in news searches. It would be nice to see google track a source's leanings in this sort of fashion and include that information in the details about the results. Too many people take what they read from a single source as gospel. It would be nice to know which way sources lean before clicking through to them.

Re:I see problems coming if Google uses trust rank

[utexaspunk]

Don't forget to give credit where credit is due. That's Gil Scott-Heron.

Re:I see problems coming if Google uses trust rank

[Anonymous Coward]

You, sir, are bananas.

Re:I see problems coming if Google uses trust rank

[d34thm0nk3y]

They are gonna have to do something. The signal to noise ration has been steadily worsening as more and more people are figuring out how to game the pagerank system.

Re:I see problems coming if Google uses trust rank

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Gawd.
I'm ashamed to say that I thought there'd be no doubt about the attribution.

Re:I see problems coming if Google uses trust rank

[smokin_juan]

I could see problems if they simply rate each of these catagories, take an average, and *bam* produce a trust rank. But the key word I'm reading in the article is "formula." The statistics aren't weigted individually but rather how they work with each other. For instance, a newer organization with lots of traffic gets a higher score than an older organization with high traffic (representing perceived public trust). Or a new organization with staff 5,000 gets a lower score than a new organization with a staff of 100 (a new large organization probably has more loans out with greased palms and backs that need scratching). These are just quick guesses using two factors. You'll probably have to come up with your own to make any sense of it.

My biggest curiousity is their definition of "trust." Are they are looking for trust in the truth of a story or trust in having the last word of the story, ala history is written by the victors. Are they looking at historical values of trustworthiness and how the hell could you even do that? I'd rather see that historical database then the results it produces.

After having defended the idea I have to admit that my TrustRank in this whole idea is pretty low. It'll be interesting to see the results, but I expected more out of their news service... like an oracle that concentrated on developing news that would make the most impact tomorrow or next week rather than the "pop news" that every other swingin' dick has published to cover up the "real news," which the freemasons and whatnot don't want us to know about ;)

Re:I see problems coming if Google uses trust rank

[pipingguy]

Any trusted site that links to lots of pages is going to have a huge link management problem. Every day hundreds of domains that it links to may expire. You can snap those up and buy trust.

That's a good point, and it has happened that some of my relevant subject matter-related links have expired and then, uh, changed content. Given enough (I mean time, not money) resources it should be possible to validate links on a regular basis though.

Re:I see problems coming if Google uses trust rank

[mrogers]

Don't forget that the list of trusted sites can be changed at any time. The TrustRank paper describes how the seed sites were carefully reviewed for signs of spamming. The good seeds were chosen partly on the basis of "a clearly identifiable authority (such as a governmental or educational institution or company) that controlled the contents of the site" (page 9).

From Google's point of view, a trusted site would have to have strict editorial standards and link to a lot of sites. I can think of a lot of sites with strict editorial content, but they generally do not link to a lot of sites.

Good seeds don't need to link to a lot of sites. Check out the algorithm - trust is divided among the domains (or pages, depending on the version of the algorithm) that a seed links to, so if a seed links to many domains it will transfer less trust to each domain than a seed that's more selective with its links.

Re:I see problems coming if Google uses trust rank

[dangitman]

To quote TFA: he database will be built by continually monitoring the number of stories from all news sources, along with average story length, number with bylines, and number of the bureaux cited, along with how long they have been in business.

Wow. That's a really bad idea. this means that those large media sources that run the most sensationalistic stories, from which they make the most money and get the most traffic - will be rated as more trustworthy than an honest reporter who doesn't work for a big company and posts detailed analysis that most people aren't interested in.

How can this do anything but reward the most simplistic, sensational and popular journals with "trust," instead of those who spend time checking facts, rather than promoting sensationalism?

Re:I see problems coming if Google uses trust rank

[utexaspunk]

really? i'd imagine most slashdotters haven't even heard that before, much less know who it was... let's hope you're right :)

Trustrank?

[awhelan]

Can we know this for sure? Has google confirmed it? What is the trustrank of newscientist.com ?

Re:Trustrank?

[A beautiful mind]

This gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "Netcraft confirms".

In other words...

[alexandreracine]

...how to make much much much more money?

Re:In other words...

[Anonymous Coward]

MOD PARENT UP!

See this site

Fucking hypocrites.

Gotta do this in public...

[Anonymous Coward]

Google,

I have always loved you since our first glory-hole meeting. Will you make me the happiest nerd-fest in the world and be my wife?

Love,

Slashdot

Slashdot's News Rotation

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Google
2. Apple
3. Firefox
4. Your Rights are being stolen!
5. Microsoft sucks.

Rinse. Repeat.

Re:Slashdot's News Rotation

[Taladar]

You forgot:

6. Ask /. : I have an important question concerning the future of my career and I ask you, the /. experts what to do.

Re:Slashdot's News Rotation

[Anonymous Coward]

6. ???
7. Profit!

Re:Slashdot's News Rotation

[Spy der Mann]

Rinse. Repeat.

Estimated TrustRank: Zero.

Re:Slashdot's News Rotation

[Phil246]

also forgot the occasional sco-bashing story.

Re:Slashdot's News Rotation

[Anonymous Coward]

$ curl -s slashdot.org | grep -c "Apple"
11
$ curl -s www.apple.com | grep -c "Apple"
8

Re:Slashdot's News Rotation

[Anonymous Coward]

6.1 Ask /. how to get a motherboard with dual support for procs without dual capability.

Re:Slashdot's News Rotation

[EnronHaliburton2004]

Hey, you forgot Star Wars! Star Wars!!!! STAR WARS! (well ok maybe HHGTTG or some other scifi movie).

Rinse. Repeat.

Goodness, is that before or after the hot grits?

Re:Slashdot's News Rotation

[wgaryhas]

Get 2 MicroATX motherboards, and 2 powersupplies and put them in 1 case, with gigabit network connection between the 2. Then set them up with a version of linux designed for grid computing. (I wish I had thought of this when I first saw the question)

Re:Slashdot's News Rotation

[roastedMnM]

*nix

Re:Slashdot's News Rotation

[MiKM]

6. Dupes of previous stories.

Re:Slashdot's News Rotation

[pipingguy]

Rinse. Repeat.

They probably should put the word, "stop" in there somewhere. My scalp is soggy and my brain is waterlogged.

Trustranking Slashdot

[lildogie]

I'll be fascinated to see how Slashdot articles get ranked.

Re:Trustranking Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never understood why Slashdot ever makes it on Google News. They rarely 'report' anything, just link to other articles.

Re:Trustranking Slashdot

[kniLnamiJ-neB]

if (SlashdotPage.search("Google"))
{ return(BEST_RANK_EVAR); }

Re:Trustranking Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

if submitter = "Roland Poquepille", then submisstion = "accepted"

Re:Trustranking Slashdot

[alexhs]

if (SlashdotPage.search("Google"))
{ return(BEST_RANK_EVAR); }

error: `BEST_RANK_EVAR' undeclared (first use in this function)

Re:Trustranking Slashdot

[MarkByers]

Slashdot takes a lot of articles and stories from a large number of websites, the editors check them for errors and ensure quality. In theory at least. ;)

It is a lot easier for Google to index one site than to hand pick articles from all over the web, and do the editing and quality control themselves.

Re:Trustranking Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

It's obvious you know absolutely nothing about Google News and how it works.

Re:Trustranking Slashdot

[Phil246]

+5 fanboyism Ofc
ofc if microsoft copy the idea, it'll be -1 Troll for them.

Re:Trustranking Slashdot

[ncc74656]

Slashdot takes a lot of articles and stories from a large number of websites, the editors check them for errors and ensure quality. In theory at least. ;)

You're new here, aren't you? :-)

Re:Trustranking Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot is being paid by Google to run Google stories, so it only makes sense that they'd be ranked highly by Google.

Good.

[Telastyn]

Now for the gamespy implimentation to see what servers are filled with lamers... Now that'd be useful!

Re:Good.

[Doctor O]

Come on. That one is easy.

grep "[Pp]ublic [Ss]erver" serverlist.lst

Hordes of Lamers for your humiliation needs.

Patent?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe I'm just being stupid, but is this really anything more than an algorithm?

Re:Patent?

[Anonymous Coward]

algorithm (v, tr) - a sequence of operations to perform a task (modern, from "Al Gore, Rhythm", Albert Gore Jr (1946-?) being a popular politician and American Vice President (1992-2000) reknowned for his command of logic, co-joined with "Rhythm" to infer repetition.)

Re:Patent?

[Anonymous Coward]

Eh? What's your point?

Re:Patent?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you got it - it's 'just' an algorithm. Albeit an incredibly sophisticated and potential very useful one.

Some points

[Sv-Manowar]

The basic ideas and principles of TrustRank:
http://www.seobook.com/archives/000661.shtml

I can see dangers in this becoming an elitist thing though, i.e Trusted Sites only linking to other trusted sites, or creating perceptions in surfer's minds. It will be interested to see how Google develop this one, that's for sure.

Re:Some points

[Neophytus]

If the sites selected as parents are hand monitored well enough then google should be able to pick up on them, for example, selling off links for profit. Seeing as there shouldn't be too many, this could be entirely possible if spread across the workforce.

Re:Some points

[nutshell42]

I can see dangers in this becoming an elitist thing though, i.e Trusted Sites only linking to other trusted sites, or creating perceptions in surfer's minds. It will be interested to see how Google develop this one, that's for sure.

Well, they've gotta learned something from the orkut (sp?) mess.

Re:Some points

[Mandrel]

I like it when the featured article on a Google News topic is from some obscure publication in some distant part of the world. It broadens my consumption of journalism, often providing an interesting different point of view.

Re:Some points

[AussieVamp2]

yeah, will there be something in this formula that downgrades organisations for anti competitive behaviour, bias, owning large percentages of the media etc to show that these are less trustworthy?

This Worries Me...

[smug_lisp_weenie]

Basically what they patented (from what I gather) is the idea of taking many factoids about a news company and putting it into a balanced formula to create a "trust" number.

However, they are not patenting the formula itself, but just the idea of using such a formula, it seems...

This seems like another case of taking an obvious idea and trying to block the competition by patenting it.

TrustRank?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, bow to Our skunk protocol. You will give us your food, or we'll raise git on Our handstand and point our tail at you as the O'reilly spotted skunk found only in the most dense Amazon.com forests of the United Nigerian estates of America.

If anyone is willing to accept these money orders, may you send me a laptop computer? The one I am using is falling to peices. Please contact me at Muabobu Mitchel "MM20012127@gmail.com", and I'll send you the money orders after you send two DELL laptops to 342 Voodoo, Pignuts, Nigeria Republic.

So, now we know how to scam it

[192939495969798999]

If you just get one link from a "trusted" site to some really un-trusted site, then POW! Down goes Frasier! I guess we'll know when that happens, because the top Google news stories will be teenage sluts, casinos, and cialis.

Astroturf

[Doc Ruby]

"Trust, but verify." - Ronnie "Rayguns" Reagan

Re:Astroturf

[Anonymous Coward]

That's actually a Russian Proverb that's been around a lot longer than Ronald Reagan; doveryay, no proveryay

Reagan was actually citing that proverb when he was talking about arms control.

Re:Astroturf

[Doc Ruby]

Yes, his speechwriter was clever enough to use a Russian proverb when writing lines for Bonzo's role as a negotiator with them. Much like Kennedy's script in opposing the Berlin blocade, without the reference to the donut.

Idea vs. implementation...

[TVmisGuided]

The idea isn't exactly new...refereed and peer-reviewed professional journals have been doing something along these lines for decades. Google, as I read it, is attempting to apply some basic scholarly principles to their listings.

Now the bad news...I don't think it will work as described. Counting "number of bureaux cited" or hops from originator isn't exactly going to keep faked articles off their listings; as someone else already pointed out, it may be a matter of shucking out the cash for a domain that suddenly gets listed as "high trust level." Then that domain can be used to post pretty much whatever they want to make people think is accurate journalism.

Sorry...I like the concept of automating the tedious task of fact-checking, but until Google can get their clusters' AI well beyond the Turing-test phase, it's not going to happen. Humans will still need to examine articles and references and make decisions as to whether a particular submission is, in fact, valid and accurate.

Just my two cents' worth...save up the change for a root beer or something...

The Mighty Morphin Slashdot Rangers???

[game kid]

Well as long as they don't take orders from a giant bluish face, or combine one day into a Megadupe, that's all right with me.

Now to figure out how to equate trolls with Bulk and Skull and flamers with Rita and Zedd...

In related news...

[Anonymous Coward]

foxnews.com just disappeared entirely from the Internet.

Re:In related news...

[Anonymous Coward]

Along with whitehouse.gov and number-10.gov.uk.

Re:In related news...

[fossilstar]

Just watch. When Dick Cheney returns as Halliburton's CEO in 2008, they'll buy Google :)

Mod Parent Up

[Anonymous Coward]

I have the pictures to prove it!

Google to tell you who to trust?

[winkydink]

Do you really need Google for this? Or is Google validation going to substitute for your own common sense?

Re:Google to tell you who to trust?

[lucabrasi999]

your own common sense?

Too much work. It's just easier to do what Google tells me to do.

Re:Google to tell you who to trust?

[2short]

I don't intend to substitute Googles validation for my common sense. But when I go to Google for news, and click on one of the top few stories on a particular topic, I want to have some expectation that I'm probably getting a reasonably trustworthy news source.

Currently I do this by scanning for one I've heard of. Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, BBC News, hell, even Al Jazeera and CNN: All of these may have biases, but I have some idea what they are, and they can all be expected to try for accuracy about the basic facts.

For more obscure stories, this doesn't necessarily work. So I'm perfectly glad to hear Google will be making some attempt to weed out those "news" sources which, to put it kindly, do not try for accuracy about the basic facts.

Links And The Linking Links That Link To Them ...

[rewinn]

... didn't Al Franken write that book already?

Google's webmonkeys are as liberal as libs get

[Anonymous Coward]

Trusted my ass. This is just another venue for liberal webmonkeys (is there any other kind???) to tweak headlines and influence on how news is delivered. No doubt they will go down the same path Yahoo News goes.

Re:Google's webmonkeys are as liberal as libs get

[AussieVamp2]

Good question, does posting on slashdot make you a webmonkey? If it does, then haven't you answered your own question?

Chickens

[Virtual Karma]

I have heard that this time they are using chickens instead of pegions for the ranking system. Is it true?

Re:Chickens

[Anonymous Coward]

what on earth is a pegion?

Yeah, but you forgot...

[game kid]

...the "A Fair and Balanced Search for Your Site" subtitle.

Re:Yeah, but you forgot...

[T-Ranger]

/me registers amifairandbalancedornot.com

Is It in Beta?

[lbmouse]

Did they copyright "TrustRank" or "TrustRank Beta"?

Already been done

[costas]

Well, this is (half) a shameless plug but my newsbot has been ranking news sources and referring meta-news sources according to "trust" for over 3 yrs now. Findory (no affiliation) does something similar by ranking each individual news story.

Re:Already been done

[Anonymous Coward]

your site is ugly tho

if your not getting great traffic try increasing the fonts at least!

it looks like one of those ad spam pages that you get when accidently clicking on a wrong link. i guess thats why its giving me a bad taste.

like this
WARNING not tested in IE

Re:Already been done

[deutschemonte]

I just checked it out and joined, shameless plug or not, it's a great idea.

Re:Already been done

[Jett]

Hmm, so is this prior art? Perhaps you can invalidate Google's patent...

question

[justforaday]

How will this affect all those litigious bastards or miserable failures out there?

the end of Jeff Gannon & Armstrong Williams?

[digitaldc]

Let us all hope!
Jeff Gannon, whose real name is James Guckert, resigned his job with the conservative Talon News after it was revealed he had used a pseudonym, had little journalism background, and had ties to male escort Web sites. ["http://www.mediainfo.com/eandp/news/article_disp lay.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000856306"]
At the same time, I (Armstrong Williams) understand that I exercised bad judgment in running paid advertising for an issue that I frequently write about in my column. People need to know that my column is uncorrupted by any outside influences. I would like to take this opportunity to apologize for my bad judgment, and to better explain the circumstances. ["http://www.townhall.com/columnists/Armstrongwill iams/aw20050110.shtml"]
http://www.fair.org/index.php

This can only be good

[Bruha]

As long as the rankings are fair and handled in a responsible matter then Google stands to give consumers the power that they have lacked for a long time. Companies will take note that if their trust ranking suffers from bad consumer reports then they will begin to pay attention.

Maybe when you search for DSL you'll see companies at the top that deserve that ranking and the companies that fall down who think they should be first would improve how they treat their customers.

Peer pressure at it's finest.

New York Times

[hey]

Well, the New York Times is one of the most trusted publications in the country. Oh, wait it isn't any more.

Now Google is starting to go too far.

[kin_korn_karn]

So Google wants to be the web's authoritative source on what sites can be trusted? I don't think I like the sound of that. No one entity should have that job.

Ideally everyone would use common sense, but so few people have that anymore that it's almost quaint to suggest it.

Re:Now Google is starting to go too far.

[Shotgun]

Anymore?!

"Common sense ain't all that common"
-Samuel Clemmons

(I probably screwed up the quotation, but it was very close to that.)

Re:Now Google is starting to go too far.

[Anonymous Coward]

So Google wants to be the web's authoritative source on what sites can be trusted?

What the fuck are you on about? TrustRank is a method for determining how valuable a particular news story is, in order to decide which news stories make it onto news.google.com and which are given the most prominence.

What kind of conspiracy crack have you been smoking to translate that into "Google are now telling us what to think"?

The same goes for the idiot that modded this up.

Re:Now Google is starting to go too far.

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe, just maybe, Google realizes their news site could be even more attractive to users if it tries to prevent bad articles from floating to the top? Is that such an awful thing for them to do?

Did you read them advertising somewhere that you should treat all pages from google.com as absolute fucking gospel?

Sooooo, what is the trust rank of CBS?

[wowbagger]

Sooooo....

What is the trust rank of CBS? Of 60 Minutes?

Re:Sooooo, what is the trust rank of CBS?

[paranoic]

About the same as W.

Trust in the eye of the beholder

[G4from128k]

Given that ALL news sources or sites have some bias, isn't trust in the eye of the beholder in many cases? Although the objective facts of some situation may be undisputed (usually these are disputed, too), the interpretation of those facts is subjective and highly dependent on the viewpoint, world model, etc.

Perhaps Google will need to introduce right-wing and left-wing versions of TrustRank. If it does not, then it will be an example of tyranny of the majority when Google asserts than the majority's bias is trustworthy.

Re:Trust in the eye of the beholder

[metamatic]

Well, there's a difference between biased presentation of facts, and insisting on the right to broadcast things you acknowledge are outright lies...

Re:Trust in the eye of the beholder

[jaysmall]

Everyone has biases, so news sources, naturally, do too. The only difference between "mainstream media" and some guy with a laptop reporting a car crash is how many people vet and filter the information before it is offered to the public. I'm a journalist of more than 20 years experience. I grew up in the business. And I've argued for years that the ease of making a message available on the Internet favors the rise of strong opinion leaders over news organizations that attempt to filter out their own biases (with admittedly varying degrees of success). It's already starting to happen. The tone of dialogue in mainstream media has started to take on characteristics of talk radio, which was the previous bastion of opinion leadership. With that trend well under way, I'm really afraid to see how Google's machines will assign "trust" values to anything.

Trusted by whom

[hey]

Reblicans trust The Free Republic but distrust The Nation.
Democrates are exactly the opposite. What should TrustRank do about that? I don't see any way to reconcile stuff like that.

Re:Trusted by whom

[hamlet2600]

I think if "trust rank" was user specific sort of the way search history works that would be ideal. You clicked on the link from the news which means 1) the article interests you and 2) you trust or are interested in what the source has to say.

For me thats the true power of google's massive database, what do I look at, and how can I find things I need faster. Give me USEFUL information from sources similar to those i have used before.

Re:Trusted by whom

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you leave the PU out of Republican on purpose?

Re:Trusted by whom

[flyingsquid]

think if "trust rank" was user specific sort of the way search history works that would be ideal. You clicked on the link from the news which means 1) the article interests you and 2) you trust or are interested in what the source has to say.

The problem I see with self-selecting the news you get is that you're soon only going to be getting facts which validate your prejudices and confirm the decisions you've already made. Of course, we're already headed there with Air America, Fox News and soforth.

Re:Trusted by whom

[hey]

No, I wasn't trying to slight either party.

Re:Trusted by whom

[kin_korn_karn]

Google will give the higher TrustRank rating to the site that the government tells them to give it to.

No! No! Stop anwering questions as though Jesus..

[Anonymous Coward]

We need to go to Slashdot's savior, sit on his lap, and ask him; What would Roland Piquepaille do?

Linux is not the answer to your problems! Repent of your solutions gathering and enter the Roland Piquepaille hardware confessions box in Redmond Washington! Halt sinners! You need be cleansed with living Blue Seas of the old ways; search-out the paths of old, for only there will your quest for the Blue Screens be found as originally intended!

whuffie

[byrd77]

one step closer to whuffie...

now where do I back myself up?

ref is to here for those not down with the ad hoc's

so no more /.

[capoccia]

so that means no more slashdot on news.google.com? with all the duplicate stories, inflamitory and incorrect analysis, and bogus stories, slashdot has to be near the bottom of the heap.

IslamOnline.org is a Google news source

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a "trusted" source, I guess.

But JawaOnline uses "hate speech", according to Google News.

Go ahead, mod this down. But Google News accepts as "news" a site that all but cheers on misogynistic honor rape.

Algorithm for Trust

[wronski]

There are two main ways of ranking news (as well as websites and whatnot): Popularity or Quality. Popularity can be easily quantified, but with news you will probably end up with big and well known media source dominating the ranking. Regardless of what one thinks about CNN or BBC, they are not what I look for in googlenews (or I would just type www.cnn.com). I want news sources that I was anware of, to give me a fresh perspective.

Quality on the other hand is very hard to measure, and any definition will surely be controversial. The metrics they are proposing will also benefit large well knwown news sources.

What I would really like though is a rank that gave the widest possible perspective. Some algorithm that would take a news event and define some broad categories of news sources (say, on news on Iraq, conservative american media, liberal american, iraqi, arab, etc.). Then one or two representatives of each category would be displayed in the ranks, choosen among the cotegory by the metrics described in the article. The trick of course is to define the categories, but I think one could do that by looking at how different sources 'cluster' together. Sources in one country link overwhelmingly among themselves rather than abroad. Conservative news sources tend to cite and link to other conservatives, ditto for liberals or any other category. This is even more true for blogs, which wouldn't be much cited in the rank itself, but are a sort of glue that binds ideological and national categories together, and thus provide useful information to help classify the news source.

I hope I'm making sense here. Just my 2cents...

Re:Algorithm for Trust

[Anonymous Coward]

But it depends how they display things;

If you were searching for information about a story, you probably WOULD want a cnn article over some random blog opinion piece that may or may not have any real facts

I agree, you should be able to find blogs, minor news sites, etc with a minimum of effort, but in most cases it's more likely that you'd want to read a larger, more mainstream source first anyway

Re:Algorithm for Trust

[wronski]

If you were searching for information about a story, you probably WOULD want a cnn article over some random blog opinion piece that may or may not have any real facts

True, but in the Iraq exemple for instance Id like a view from a representative news source from, say, and Arab paper, an Iraqi paper and perhaps, say, a american soldiers blog taht mentions the incident first hand. Each of these sources would be identified automaticaly by google because they are each the most popular, and trusted acording to the criteria proposed by google, in a certain cluster of links. So, a random blog would never be high in the rank unless it was linked to by many other sources reporting the same event.

Again, just my 2cents.

If this works, what it could mean

[Anonymous Coward]

If this works, what it could mean is that the 'news' organizations will have their 'trustrank' plummet over time as their suck-ass propaganda and non-fact-checked stories get outed and accounted for. Then the independent sites who get the story right may start to show up in the ranks as 'trusted' new sources. Could be a boon for independent media.

Another Google Article?

[Cheirdal]

I use Google a LOT at work and at home. Google is a great search engine that most people use every day. We're going to read about the new functionality on their site when they implement it. I don't understand the obsessive need that some people feel to follow everything that Google does. This is like writing a new article every time a car manufacturer adds a new feature. "The New Corvette to feature a digital clock on the dashboard...".

This kind of blind horn blowing for a company is why Google's stock is $220 a share even though the company isn't worth any where near $220 a share. I hope when the stock finally comes down to earth to a value that the company can back up (and it will) it won't cause another tech blowout like in 2000.

Re:Another Google Article?

[duffbeer703]

Google is important because millions of people use it multiple times per day. Many people don't even type URLs into their browsers directly anymore... they just enter website names into the google toolbar or homepage.

So in short, knowing about what makes a #1 result a #1 result is critically important. We are moving from a phase where relevance & the work of hucksters looking for higher rankings drove search ranks to a new era, where "credibility" and political considerations will drive the results.

Re:Another Google Article?

[Cheirdal]

It hasn't mattered much in the 10 or so years since AltaVista was at the top of the search engine heap. What troubles me most about Google is that they do accept pay for rankings in a lot of cases. This makes their rankings less trust worthy to me than AltaVista was 10 years ago when they were just indexing what their web spiders brought back. Of course any big search engine is going to be looking to make a profit and that's understandable.
Money aside, I don't need to look up the credibility of my searches when I'm doing keyword searches for technical issues. I also don't need to look up the credibility when I'm looking up information on current movies, local restaurants, news articles on current events, or doing something like looking up a synopsis of "Othello" or "MacBeth". Everything I look up is very limited by the multiple keywords I use in my search.

As bad as he is, W ain't "fake but accurate"

[Anonymous Coward]

Besides, W's a politician.

CBS News is supposed to be unbiased, with fact-based reporting. But they pulled politically-motivated lies out of Dan Rather's rectal database in order to influence a Presidential election.

A dmoz editor, eh?

[DeadSea]

Is this you: http://dmoz.org/profiles/psiolent.html

I wonder if you can find my editor profile? ;-)

Re:A dmoz editor, eh?

[Psiolent]

Here you are: http://dmoz.org/profiles/deadsea.html

You're certainly a more prolific editor than I am. I apologize for my arrogance. :)

Re:A dmoz editor, eh?

[RussR42]

You guys are good. Found each other's editor pages that just happened to use the same handle as your /. accounts. Clever! :)

just boils down to

[ahdeoz]

how much you trust google

You Want Prior Art?

[lofi-rev]

I got your prior art http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=116588&cid=986 5259">right here.

My Trustrank algorithms...

[GPLDAN]

IF author = 'Enderle' THEN TRUST=ZILCH AND BONEHEAD = 1.

IF author = 'DiDio' THEN TRUST=NADA AND MICROSOFT_SHILL = 1

IF topic = 'SCO' THEN RELEVENCE TO ANYONE = RELEVANCE TO ANYONE - 1000

IF quoted_source = 'Marc Andressen' THEN WHO_FUCKING_CARES = 1

IF news_organization = 'FOX' then BULLSHIT_IS_AFOOT = 1.

Re:My Trustrank algorithms...

[Shotgun]

IF news_organization = 'FOX' && subjec = 'CBS' then DAN_RATHER_LYING_AGAIN = 1.

Re:My Trustrank algorithms...

[Anonymous Coward]

How could you forget Maureen O'Gara? :(

IF source='MoG' THEN TRUST = 0 AND RESEARCH = craptastic AND WANTS TO PRINT INFO SCO IMPROPERLY LEAKED TO HER BY HAVING IT UNSEALED = 1.

Slashdot articles get their rank right here

[Anonymous Coward]

No need to go to Google at all to see how /. articles rank.

Isvestia nye Pravda, y Pravda nye Isvestia

[John Hasler]

From the article I conclude that the old Soviet Union's news services would have ranked very high.

Oh, well. Google News was nice while it lasted.

Re:Isvestia nye Pravda, y Pravda nye Isvestia

[Anonymous Coward]

("News isn't Truth, and Truth isn't News". For those who don't get the joke: Izvestia ("News") and Pravda ("Truth") were Soviet newspapers.)

What the...

[Robotron23]

How on earth can this "Trustranking" system be in the least bit credible. It sounds blatently flawed in that it shall rate articles in a rather black and white.

What if for example, I created a news website that was amusing and satirical prior to Trustranking, and while quite funny and witty, wasn't really accurate to the story, instead embellishing it somewhat, how on earth would it be possible to Trustrank a site like this?

Also, what is trustranking in proportion to? Reputable news sites such as the BBC? Or is it all in proportion to people's own (no doubt conflicting) views?

Just to clarify, i'm not trolling here, but seriously how can this idea work?

we need something like this

[Qwavel]

The internet provides us with such unlimited info that the problem is no longer finding information, it is deciding who to trust.

Everyone probably has some internal list of sources they trust, but maintaining such a list is very hard.

If TrustRank could be done and done right (???) then it would be a wonderful service.

But, can any corporation be trusted to do this? Surely they would eventually start to 'sell' higher trust ratings? I 'trust' google, but it is still a corporation and it's job is to make money.

Slashdot...

[Anonymous Coward]

the 24 hour Google network

Political implications

[Heraklit]

There will be political implications of this new ranking system. I bet nobody has really thought this through...

What "trust rank" would you give Al Jazeera, for example?

It is a state-owned, but journalistically largely independent big satellite network with a lot of staff and a huge audience. Just from an area of the world that might have different views.

Re:Political implications

[Truth_Quark]

And what "trust rank" would you give "fox news" for the same reason?

It is an Australian Owned (except for a technicality), satellite, cable, and broadcast network with a lot of staff, a huge audience and the most valuable thing that it sells is manufactured consent.

Re:Political implications

[AussieVamp2]

more Chinese and Indian people, but fair chance that American sources going to be ranked higher than these you would think?

Never Be Evil . . .

[kingjosh]

Isn't this behavior outside their mission statement? If Google's just going to be another patent farm and start using geniuses to come up with obvious ideas, I'd hardly call that not being evil . . . but that's just me.

Oh, they took pictures with panties on their heads

[Anonymous Coward]

That's such horrible torture.

Cry me a river, you fucking dhimmi wuss.

That breaks what I like about it!

[Anonymous Coward]

I like getting all those articles from offbeat little places around the world. Kind of a random snapshot of what's going, as perceived by whoever.

google bias

[Anonymous Coward]

This is bad news.
The google news division clearly has political bias.

There's been a few scandals where google has been blocking conservative bloggers but adding in pro nazi & terrorist news groups.

It's trouble that such a small group of people in such a powerful company has the ability to make decisions about what they want to censor and not.

Makes you almost think google is in kahootz with the mainstream liberal media groups!

Sites that I trust

[sapped]

How about over time Google learns which sites I trust and modifies the ranking according to that. We could give each site a thumbs up or down rating like you do on a TiVO.

Re:Sites that I trust

[rsborg]

How about over time Google learns which sites I trust and modifies the ranking according to that.

But that wouldn't solve the problem of people who just put out shite and are effectively unaccountable for it. Sure, YOU get your news from the sources you want and believe to be true, but I'd also like to be able to see what "TrustRank thinks is valid" as an indicator. Not that I'd trust it alone but it might be a good source among 2 or 3 to determine validity.

Nice prediction!

[MarkByers]

Just two stories later, 'Your Rights Online: The SCO Trial Through A New Lens'.

http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/05/04/29/1950245.shtml ?tid=123&tid=136&tid=88&tid=155

Re:Nice prediction!

[Phil246]

heh I think it was more through luck then prediction :D
That said i suppose it was inevitable another SCO story would pop up again

MOD PARENT UP.

[HishamMuhammad]

This will be a very interesting thing to watch.

I always paid attention to which news sites does the Google algorithm chooses to use as a primary source to a news item, and they are, more often than not, American sites. Anyway, news.google.com has been an useful source, since you can click on "all 1,777 related" and browse through the headlines and see the varying oppinions around the world. Example: this one was picked as a headline:

Bush Promotes New Plan for Social Security as Benefit to Young

In the other headlines, you see other views:

• Bush Speech Fuels Capitol Debate Over Social Security's Future
• Bush on offensive as ratings hit floor
• Bush Plan Would Cut Benefits
• Bush pitches plan to fix Social Security finances
• For first time, Bush backs benefit cuts to help bolster Social ...
• Bush vs. The Press

And from here you can read articles from the various dissenting views. To me, that's the main utility of news.google.com. I wonder if TrustRank is going to start favoring sites such as CNN... after all, they're "America's most trusted news source" (according to themselves, at least).

In the end, nothing beats reading the news from a number of different news sources. Unfortunately, most people don't do that.

Begging for Lawsuit

[Anonymous Coward]

How long until FOX or some other big-shit corporate "news" source gets a sour TrustRank rating and decides to sue Google?

Google, you don't get to tell me who to trust. I'm not sure I even trust you.

It's a great idea!

[Skippy_kangaroo]

The number of times I have used Google News and clicked on the top link only to get some barely literate ramblings are too many to count.

Recently it seems that some San Francisco Real Estate site was getting high ranks for its barely literate ramblings on news topics that had nothing to do with real estate. This isn't about squashing the small guy - this is about getting a news story that is literate. I, for one, will welcome a day when I don't have to scroll down to the 153rd link on a story to find something useful (the first 152 would contain 143 duplicates of the AP story and 9 illiterate pieces of junk).

Parody news articles and trustrank

[zoogies]

I have concerns that trustrank will limit the variety of news we get from Google News search, but I'm wondering if it will get rid of parody search results at the top. A few weeks ago, I did a google news search on John Kerry, and got several parody articles near the top...with all due respect to their sense of humor, I think there are more important articles than that.

Instead of only selecting news from the top 200 or so sources, wouldn't it be better if Google did the opposite and filtered out known unreliable sources? I think it's a given that we surf at our own risk and take information presented to us (even on trusted sites) with a grain of salt...why trustrank?

Xinhua

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope this means that Xinhua will stop being the first news service listed all the time. Sometimes I wonder if I'm going to be labeled a communist, as often as I've accidentally surfed to that site on my DoD computer.

Thank God, blogging will finally die!

[Anonymous Coward]

nuf said.

Difference to Advogato's trust metric?

[danpat]

http://www.advogato.org/trust-metric.html
Is Google implementing the same algorithm?

Seriously bogus

[zogger]

The big fat corporate media news sites will get a 'trusted" rating. The same ones who are *not* covering the three trillion in countefeit cash haul the other day, the ones *not* covering the intense gannon/whitehouse coverup scandal, the ones *not* covering the sibel edmonds 9-11 coverup scandal, and etc. They will be "trusted". Sites covering important news, news that would tend to get people to think a little differently and offer a real difference, will get ignored or buried, same as they are now, just worse.

Google dudes, you reading this? You are going to further entrench globalist medicority fluff crapola and governmental/corporate newsaganda. We've been trying to *get away from that*, it causes most of the problems by keeping people dumbed down and faked out with the "big lie" principle.

We'll see how it shakes out, but on the surface I don't like it already. You click on a random google news story now, it might say "89 more", you go there and there's 89 variations of the same exact AP or Reuters release, and half of those requiring "registration" for your "convenience". Big hairy deal. Like why bother.

Problem with Acknowledged 'Bad' Links

[TomDalton]

Scenario: Reputable news site 'A' posts a story about fake news site 'B' that includes a link to site B. Google sees site A linking to site B and improves the TrustRank of site B.

A hundred other good news sites also post stories about how abominably bad site B is, and pretty quick site B is ranked the most trustworthy site in the world.

Without any context sensitivity, TrustRank can be a dangerous thing.

This can only be good-To Go.

[Anonymous Coward]

Semantic web, baysian filters, and FOAF to the rescue.

Basically you have a browser button that allows you to train on each site you visit. Now combine this with OWL marked pages with the above, plus the "web of most likely trust" (FOAF), and your browser can intelligently decide on weither to load a site or not. The pageranking is decided on an individual basis, and the feedback is the web site stats that the webmaster sees. If one wants this process to work faster? There could be voluntary pooling of what the local browsers are trained up (stripped of personal info)* on. And webmasters (along with a lot of other people) could get the information they need to make their sites better.

*It would also make a great tool for determining the "heartbeat" of the internet.

Political implications-Apple: iTrust.

[Anonymous Coward]

"What "trust rank" would you give Al Jazeera, for example?"

Define "trust"?

Trust to be factually correct?

Trust to speak the party line?

Anyway, as I pointed out elsewere. The best kind of trust is the one you trust. Maybe Google could help by making the news available in a more machine-friendly form, and let the user work out the trust issue?

Trust who?

[dangitman]

The things I trust in news sources are the things I trust, and I don't base that trust on what other people think. I certainly don't base that trust on the size or popularity of a media source.

This is the worst idea I have ever heard from Google. The only thing I can see coming from this is increased media consolidation - and therefore a decrease in the diversity of different viewpoints and outlets for journalism. It seems designed to drive readers back to the old media monopolies that serve us so poorly.

Google need to stop

[Anonymous Coward]

"Google do it again. Yay for Google, who are not evil and we can all trust and who make the internet better."

On the subject of trust, Google built their reputation on the back of their search results which were better than those of competitors at the time. However they have eroded that trust since early on with a steady stream of privacy and information related question marks over their services.

Google are too powerful now and abuse patents to hold onto Pagerank, this is gives them an unfair advantage and almost forces people into using them because their search results tend to be better than the competition. This effectively provides them with a monopoly on searches. Through that monopoly they present a load of tempting (to some) services like Gmail, but which were designed to indefinately log huge chunks of your life by encorouging the archiving of all emails. And we all know that it is scanned to provide targeted advertising and held onto and backed up and inspected by Google own's employees as they wish.

The potential for abuse alone here is enough. But now they want to present other people's sites on the basis of how trustworthy they are.

Trust is something only individuals can make a decision on. You cannot offer 'trust' as a service. You can make personal subjective reviews over things sure, that's what newspapers and magazines do after all, you can collect a wide range of opinions on a given subject, but you can't present trust as a kind of absolute commodity that is definable through a points system.

What Google seem to be doing is redescribing page rank and calling it Trustrank to be present it as a new service and give themselves more patent powers which they can exploit. That is misleading to say the least, and ultimately plain wrong.

Even more so when you consider Trustrank is targeted toward news sites who often have a particular social or political slant or audience. You simply cannot offer a global trustometer and for these sites in particular.

What's more though, it actually exposes the shocking arrogance of Google, and their contempt toward the decision making ability of the individual, who Google seek to reduce to inhuman, unaware 'nodes' to arbitarily have data funneled to them based on whatever new "weighty, trusted, ranked, authoratitive" point scoring scheme Google comes up with today.

I'm sure you will all agreee, this is bad.

trust rank

[js7a]

Sheesh! I hope I will still be able to sort by date.

bad !!

[Riiz]

is trastrank limited to news articles? I don't think so.. And that will be very bad.

newscientists should RTFP

[digiz]

The Newscientist article fails to report an important change with the new plans to rank credibility of news sources. On their "About Google News" page, Google claims a main feature of their News service is that is "compiled solely by computer algorithms, without human intervention". However the patent states "a human opinion of the news source" and "amount of important coverage that the news source produces" will be used along with a number of other factors mentioned in the Newscientist to determine the credibility of the source. Maybe Newscientist should actually read the patents themselves. http://www.wipo.int/cgi-pct/guest/ifetch5?ENG+PCT- ALL.vdb+14+1135032-SCORE+256+4+-1+DECL-ENG+31+52+2 6+25+SEP-0/HITNUM,B,,SCORE+google