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What's Next For Google News
Stony Stevenson writes in with a Computerworld interview with a Google product manager talking about what's coming up for Google News, such as the possible addition of a video component and closer cooperation with YouTube. "One of Google's most popular and controversial services, Google News, is the aggregation and search site that media companies love to hate because it has become a major source of Web traffic and frustrations for many of them.... 'In an ideal world, Google News would show you who broke the story and the other articles that built on that. There are places where we're not doing that perfectly today.'"
and their own team of reporters would be nifty. Google TV and maybe re-stream CSPAN, etc... I'd like to see that at least.
We get closer to EPIC everyday.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
May be Google could maintain the records of false reports, reports that were later corrected etc and come up with a "trustability" coefficient for the reporters and reporting organizations. This will probably give some incentives to verify the reports.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I'm sure it will be decent for RSS and other sorts, but they'll never show anything such as this Google and Memorial day
"Please, shut up. Just when I think you can't say anything more stupid, you speak again." -Archie Bunker.
I don't care who broke a story first. What I want is the story that covers the event best.
(IANAL)
I pull plenty RSS feeds from Google/News to analyze how Media works.
You can draw charts which news channel or paper is owned by whom and make predictions how channel or paper XY will add or remove information from an article to push lobbying in one or the other direction (or sometimes both if the Ad revenue demands it).
It helped me to understand how we get manipulated. It made me ignorant for my own good.
You might believe that you find the truth between left and right? Even those days are over.
Contrary to what moronic sites like Digg (which last I checked only allows one submission per URL, with no editorial review) would have you believe is the "right way" to do things, I really don't care in the slightest who reported on an event "first". I care who reported on it in a manner which tells me best what I want to know about it.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
I would start with the obvious things, like animated GIFs, marquee tags for headlines, and background sounds. Ohhh and those Javascript routines that make your mouse cursor look all weird! I mean yeah, YouTube news videos would be nice I guess, but that shouldn't be at the top of the list.
-William Brendel
I know not all on this site like Digg & Reddit but I find these sites have merit in flagging news. Better still would be if a user community was to interact with Google News (which ought extend to more journal articles etc). Then they could "tag" stories & vote as with say Reddit. More interestingly GoogleNews could start learning what I liked (e.g. as with all slashdottians stories about new & improved blowup wives) but better again it could start learning who I liked: e.g. perhaps 68% of times I follow through on stories that "Cowboy Neal" votes up. So to summarize base "My stories" on:
/.)
1) My hero's tastes (and I want it to figure out my heros)
2) My preferred sources (eg
3) My preffered tags
4) General stream
If people are rushing to be 'FRIST!' then wont verification of facts come a distant second to making a scoop?
Its bad enough with 24h news networks trying to out do each other - this can only make it worse. Why not rank in terms of the reliability of the source. (How one measures that is, of course, a bit of a problem...)
I'm not sure what's next, but I know what's already here -- horizontal scrollbars!
Sigh.
My guess is that most web designers are also Windows users who run all their programs in fullscreen, or otherwise work for folks that believe their sites merit an inordinate amount screen real estate. Given the amount of rubbish on the intarweb, I don't think I'm alone in finding a complaint or two in that regard. On my 1024x768 laptop, for example, I'll allot no more than 75% of the screen to a Firefox window (maybe full screen for The New York Times). If Slashdot can fit nicely, why can't everyone else? Or do people not mind the staring into a lightbulb effect? Or the eyestrain of reading overlong lines of text? Then again, maybe they don't read at all.
Google News was always a favourite of mine. Not entirely representative of what I'd consider newsworthy, but it distinguishes itself in a number of areas, not the least of which is the typical Google style of conciseness (measured in terms of both screen real estate and content) we've all come to expect.
Maybe I'll just say f*ck it and go back to using a text browser. Oddly enough, most of the news stories I read by copying the link address into lynx, etc. to spare myself the grief of encountering bloated and slow loading pages with little content which, surprise, constitute the majority of news sites aggregated.
- Agence France Presse
- All Belgian-French Newspapers
Google News could use more depth. As it is, "top stories" run for many days and categorized in the broadest possible way, making deeper search into less popular stories very difficult. If not for the search feature and Google Alerts, the site would be indistinguishable from the Associated Press wire. Personalization just doesn't allow enough options. I would like to see more refined categories. For example, instead of the blunt "Nanotechnology" category, subheadings for solar energy news would draw lots of interest, to name just one possibility. Or create sister sites: "Google Geek News," "Google Punditry News," "Google Phun News." Sure, their RSS reader allows anyone to create a personalized aggregator, but again that places an obstacle in the way, all the work involved in generating lists. (Just emulate originalsignal.com!)
Eh, but the news is nothing really. The medium is the message. Google just wants to put ads in front of us. They have better resources than any company to help each of us find the news that will appeal to us and keep us coming back. YouTube is not the answer I was hoping for.
TFA doesn't mentions GeoRSS. Sad since Google already supports GeoRSS and it would be more than appropriate for global news diffusion...
Animoog.org
try to parse it, I dare you!
-=[ place
They need to stop fscking with everything. It was fine, now it's starting to look cluttered.
Google has made a right pig's ear out of Deja News where they have developed their own interface, which is javascript heavy and becoming a nuisance to use. I long for the days when i could read USENET news with Mozilla, threaded, unthreaded by date, etc.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
This rings in a whole new level of FIRST POAST!!1
Roll up all the repetitive re-gurgitating of the very same stories somehow. Like when you see that there are 763 stories about some topic and it turns out about 650 of them are just local newspapers re-posting the same AP article word for word. So you have to page through them 20 or so per screen to get to the different ones. Just post one and then link the user to a page that lists all the sites that have it and when it was posted on each site.
Try to link the Babel fish feature to the news, so we can compare how the English and Arabic sources are reporting the same events. I suspect news nowadays splits along language fault lines even more than political affiliation, national affiliation, etc. because the user base in each language does not (in general) even read any of the others. The more spillover, the more sameness the sources will eventually take on.
Coming up with ways to improve a service like Google News is not the hard part. The hard part is implementation and, unfortunately, legal wrangling with the sites that Google aggregates. The latter probably prevents a number of easier-to-implement features because Google probably doesn't want to ruffle more feathers than they are already.
/. type system to help bring the good ones out (of course, you may want to ignore the rankings if you disagree with those reading GN)
That said, let me list a few things that I'd love to see with Google News.
- Greater customization of the main page. One thing I thought of I see that GN already has - custom sections based on keywords of your choosing. Still, I can think of wanting sections which contain more broad categories or exclude certain stories. If, for example, I want to exclude any story with the words "Paris Hilton", I could have a filter set up to do that.
- Preferential treatment from news sources I like. In any given search or category, these sources would be given a bump over their previous rankings.
- Tying in with that, a general moderation system. Given enough people using the service, news stories could be moderated in a
- Barring that, Google has tons of click-through data on what people read. I'm not sure how much of that (if any) is taken into account when deciding which stories to include.
- One problem with GN moving away from beta is they haven't added ads to it yet. I've heard this is because they're afraid of backlash from the companies they're linking. I'd personally be willing to pay a small ($5/mo?) subscription fee for Google News if it can pull off the following:
- Use Google's massive bandwidth to host newswire (AP, Reuters) and major newspaper (NYTimes, LATimes, etc) articles themselves, without ads and with a clean, simple interface
- Pay a fraction of my subscription fee to those sites whose articles I read. Newspapers are struggling to find ways to generate revenue online now, as only the WSJ started with a subscription from day 1. If Google can build up enough "value-added" to start a commercial service, they might be able to break the tradition of heavy-ads news sites.
- Continue to link to sites not part of the Google network
- Offer many new customization options for paid users
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
If there is one thing Internet services do not need, it's tighter video integration.
A text article gives me the option to quickly scan it and get the bits I need, or skip it entirely because I'm not interested. This all takes a second or so. If it is interesting to me, I can read the full text for more thorough treatment of the issue.
All this video junk takes us back to TeeVee mode. Bullshit commercials, intro from reporter, setup, then the actual item. This takes much longer, even when disregarding any network delays, load times, application problems, bandwidth limits, etc.
I have largely stopped reading cnn.com, because half of their linked articles on the front page are video.
On Christmas:
The RSS itself is ok, http://feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F% 2Fnews.google.com%2F%3Fned%3Dus%26topic%3Dh%26outp ut%3Drss but that's not the least of it..
Just take any of the <description> entries and validate them as valid HTML 4.01 and you'll see that google make the same mistakes each and every time with things like a closing </b> crosses an opening <font> and no closing </tr> and </td> before the closing </table>, etc. What perverse and simple errors they have in their main template. How can they overlook this?
-=[ place
But I'm sure http://daylife.com/ will get there first ;)
DISCLAIMER: I do work for them, so take my opinions with a grain of salt
I'd love to be able to see where a story came from. Especially for online news sources, we often have the situation where 20 different sites all post the same story, but the details differ. The stories are translated back and forth between languages, each site has to use their own words (otherwise it is a copyright violation), and many sites have their own angles.
Being able to track down the relationship between the reports would greatly help separating the facts from the fiction in the story.
I suspect he was referring to US internal politics...
Seen from my point the dividing line in US politics seem to be between right wing extremists and right wing lunatics. Showing "both sides" in such a situation does not really bring any additional light to the subject.