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Google News to Host Wire Service Stories

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the baskets-of-all-the-eggs dept.

knhasan writes to tell us that Google has just announced a new program in which they will host wire news stories directly on their site. This is widely believed to be the first concrete fallout from recent troubles with Agence France Presse (who sued Google for alleged copyright infringement) among other wire services. "The new feature unveiled Friday is called 'duplicate detection,' which lets Google News identify the original source of a story that may appear in tens or hundreds of news outlet Web sites. If the source story is from one of the four news service agencies that Google has licensing agreements with, Google will display the story on a page that it hosts."

15 of 63 comments (clear)

  1. Woohoo by Ironspork · · Score: 3, Funny

    So we can finally stop getting the same story posted over and over? (hint, digg and /.) If their stories are decent, I'm moving over there....

  2. Finally... by bcdm · · Score: 5, Funny

    A website that cares about duplicate detection! It's as if they understand that readers don't want to read the same story again and again and again! I wish I could think of another website that would benefit from this technology!

    --
    I can has sig?
    1. Re:Finally... by ettlz · · Score: 5, Funny

      A website that cares about duplicate detection! It's as if they understand that readers don't want to read the same story again and again and again! I wish I could think of another website that would benefit from this technology!

    2. Re:Finally... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      From:SPAA (Slashdot Posters Association of America)
      To: ettiz (639203)

      Sir,

      We note with some regret (but mostly with glee) that you have duplicated, copied and otherwise stolen one of our (potentil) members Intellectual Property. It is estimated that this heinous crime has cost our (potential) member in excess of $10,000 per view. You have stolen this persons livelihood and he will now be required to live on the street and will, most likely, die of starvation and sorrow before the next equinox. Given these indisputable facts, and your clear malicious intent, we hereby notify you that unless you pay $1,000,0000 immediately to the SPAA (we will then hand 0.001% of the settlement directly to our member) we will be obliged to take you (or someone like you, or possibly someone dead) to court.

      We expect and demand your immediate co-operation. (or that of an employer, your children, your ISP or your cat)

      Signed

      Tod Hsals
      (Vice deputy junior legal officer)
      Slashdot Posters Association of America

      (For clarity, this is not a legal notice, you need take no action, and its totally off topic, if slightly pertinent to your last post.)

  3. It's a good thing by Evets · · Score: 3, Interesting

    From a consumer standpoint, I really like this move.

    It seems to be completely random which site a given story will point to and there are times when I click through to a news item and I'm immediately skeptical of the source site. If a news vendor isn't doing any sort of value-add, I don't see why I should get sent to bob's scraped wire site versus a trusted major news source.

    1. Re:It's a good thing by LiquidCoooled · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I go to google news specifically for the variation in sources.
      I like to see the varying articles and standpoints available for the same story (usually in the editorials around the actual feed).
      If google starts feeding me a single specific variation with one POV its worse in my book.

      --
      liqbase :: faster than paper
    2. Re:It's a good thing by MBraynard · · Score: 5, Informative
      Try reading. It's easier than being stupid. Let me explain.

      Hundreds of websites run the same identical AP/AFP/Reuters/UPI/Etc. wire services news story. Until now, G news would show ALL of those stories.

      Now, when it detects a story that is from a wire service and just reposted, it will show it on the Gnews site, as Gnews has a subscription for all of them (except AFP apparently.)

      However, if the Corner Podunk Press writes an original story on the shuttle launch, it too will be linked.

      The loser here are news sites that do run wire service stories as they will no longer be getting free traffic from Gnews. This might encourage them to be more original.

    3. Re:It's a good thing by martin-boundary · · Score: 2, Interesting
      I'd mod you up if I had points, that's spot on. The "upstream sources" are syndicated wire news feeds and columns, and the downstream media (that includes "trusted major sources" like the NY Times) pick and choose the bits of a given story that they want to show, and rewrite it for effect and desired story size.

      It's actually very easy for Google engineers to identify the sources, because they _have_ all the possible source texts at their disposal: anybody who subscribes to AFP/Reuters/AP/etc obtains the raw sources. Then it's just a matter of writing a program which computes the percentage of sentence overlap between a downstream story and each of the possible raw stories - with a precomputed index it's very simple: anybody can do this with open source indexing tools and open source text analysis tools on freshmeat.

      The case of images is both easier and more difficult: in most cases, the images on a news story are syndicated and used "as is", so a simple pixel comparison gives a match to the syndicated source, but sometimes the image is cropped or modified, and then it's difficult to identify, but not necessarily impossible.

      Unfortunately, it's not possible to infer the bias of the nation wide (or world wide) reading population with your method, as the article collection system used by Google introduces a publication bias itself, which swamps the natural proportions. All you get is a non uniform sampling of news sources, which at best tells you the possible extremes of viewpoint assuming they reflect their reader base, but that's still interesting.

  4. I'm hoping for better reporting. by khasim · · Score: 2, Interesting

    So, there won't be duplicates.

    Which means that in order to attract people to YOUR news site, you'll have to ADD something. Either background research, interviews, commentary, etc.

    Sure, the commentary might not be "better". It will probably still be biased. But the facts should appear more consistently now.

  5. In related news... by Spy+der+Mann · · Score: 2, Funny

    the UPSTO has just received a patent application from some Dr. McLeod for a "method and apparatus to discriminate identical story submissions in news sites, in which there can be only one".

  6. dup detection -- fantastic for the smaller papers by sdedeo · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I don't know why I'm posting so much today, but anyway.

    This is very useful. As far as I can tell, it only means that you won't get a billion copies of the same AP, Reuters, etc. press release that many papers, because they have cut their staff, print in lieu of actually doing their own research. This is fantastic news, and will hopefully be another reward for smaller newspapers who do actually do something instead of print ads for car dealerships. If the Sasquatch Press has a Middle Eastern correspondent, their journalist's work will not be lost in the spam flood of AP articles. Of course, the Sasquatch Press won't have such a correspondent, but they may indeed have one for Sasquatch City -- who probably knows a hell of a lot more than the AP reporter airlifted in when the Sasquatch Robots gain consciousness.

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    Protect your liberties. Donate to the ACLU
  7. Re:All your newsbase are belong to us by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I've never read my local paper for anything other than local news, which Google doesn't report.

  8. Re:All your newsbase are belong to us by westlake · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Checkmate. Google owns the news. Game over for your local paper. I predicted this many years ago.

    The game begins for your local paper.

    The Niagara Falls Reporter is a free tabloid that efficiently - and hilariously - extinguished the career of the most corrupt and incompetent mayor this border town has known in living memory.

    It succeeds by relying on a minimal staff, reporting and opinion with strong local roots - in John Hanchette, for example, it has a founding editor of USA Today,a former editor of the Niagara Gazette and a man with a Pulitzer to his credit and a national reputation as a journalist and teacher.

  9. Nope. by raehl · · Score: 2, Funny

    Try reading. It's easier than being stupid. Let me explain.

    Not true. Being stupid is easier. No explanation required.

    --
    paintball
  10. Whoever modded this down is an idiot by symbolset · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The newspaper I was working for when I predicted this is still available at its vestigal domain name here where I helped set it up.

    At the end of a meeting to review a very expensive (>100K$) demographic survey in 1992, I spoke my mind. I told him a number of things, including that the toxic ink on dead tree business model wouldn't last forever, that communities were more important that forums, that the Internet wouldn't be male dominated forever and that user generated content was more important than expert generated content. He thought I was a flake. It cost me my job to tell him what I really thought, and I was right. It cost him >100K to hear what the demographer thought he wanted to hear.

    I don't regret it at all. He was an idiot too and he deserved to miss out on the .boom billions he could have had.

    --
    Help stamp out iliturcy.