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Google Planning To Serve "High Quality News" Passively
krou writes "The Wrap has an interesting interview with Eric Schmidt on Google's new plan for news. Google is apparently planning on rolling out 'high-quality news' to users who are not actively searching for news. It's expected to launch in approximately six months' time, and the first two news organizations to be involved will be The New York Times and The Washington Post. 'Under this latest iteration of advanced search, users will be automatically served the kind of news that interests them just by calling up Google's page. The latest algorithms apply ever more sophisticated filtering — based on search words, user choices, purchases, a whole host of cues — to determine what the reader is looking for without knowing they're looking for it. And on this basis, Google believes it will be able to sell premium ads against premium content.' Although Schmidt said that companies like the New York Times won't get any of this ad revenue, he commented that it will push stories to users who want them, drive up traffic to those stories, and in turn bring higher advertising rates for those stories."
As VentureBeat points out, Google hasn't officially confirmed any of this, and with no ad revenue going to the other companies, it only partially addresses complaints that Google is profiting unfairly from the work of news publications.
it only partially addresses complaints that Google is profiting unfairly from the work of news publications.
I'll gladly pay for American news when it quits being a fucking joke. Oh Noes! The swine flu is out to get us!
Now who can I actively pay *not* to be exposed to stories from the NY Times or the Washington Post?
Maybe Google can get paid twice: once by the rags to get their stories shoveled to the top of the heap, and another time by the users to get them buried back down again.
Pretty clever, Google, now that I think of it...
In other news, Google continue to completely take over the World.
Smivs on the intertubes!
For Google to take over ALL high speed access broadband and kill the
idiots like Time Warner, AT&T et al. They have the money and are closer
to being honest with subscribers. Oh well, that will never happen.
IF there is to be a monopoly, it should be from intelligent overlords,
not profit driven idiots. Yeah, we have all heard that before.
So if my most common search terms are "boobies" and "robots"
It's going to show me NYTimes articles about just that? Sweet.
Ummm pardon me for asking but isn't that what a search engine does? Gets you what you they think you want? If someone developed a tool that gave me exactly what I wanted regardless of my syntax...sign me up and where do I buy stock?
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
Can we get a 'caprica' tag? When you're enjoying your convenient personalized news, remember that you're *this* much closer to immortal cylon greatness.
" Quality News" is like " Military Intelligence" "Reality Television" or "Recent History", all oxymorons. ,oxy=sharp moron=dull...
Brushing up on information theory can show that
poor reporting ethics, editing, spin, and propaganda all lower the quality of "News" (should be 'olds' as it's already happened").
hmmm
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
They get you what they think you want after you ask for it. That's a critical difference between what Google does now and the proposed new system.
No, that is a typo. Grammar errors would be actual misuse of the language, not simply forgetting a word. Also why the fuck does someone tag with typoinsummary? You know we're gonna point it out in the comments. Why not use that tag for something useful that can aid in searching articles and what not. Pedantic bastards.
No comprende? Let me type that a little slower for you...
Well great. So when boss pops by to shoot the shit & says, "Hey, punch up *super-cool-ApGizmo* for me", I have to remember not to use damn Google.
Hello, AC! Your Custom Preference Page:
SPORTS |TECH| NEW-PRON | PRON-PRON | PROGRAMMING | PRON | NEW POKER STRATEGIES! | COOL JOBS |FOOTBALL NFL | FOOTBALL LINGERIE | UNIX | A-HOLE BOSS | STOCKS | PRON STOCKS | STOCKINGS | STOCKINGS FETISH
Fan... fucking-tastic
You know what I'm talking about. The big bag of Google money supposed to go to every newspaper because they are so gosh darn important. The bag of monthly money that was being legislated because driving hits to their websites wasn't funding their business model. Many newspapers were fooled into going deeply into debt by the premise that nothing would ever change, why can't Government just fix this?
...so in six months time google will link me to slashdot?
Ya I know ;) Even when you ask for something they are just doing a best guess. Getting exactly what you asked for is akin to solving for Zeta in a Taylor series. But yes, I love google for it's simplicity, I don't need another yahoo.com throwing random data to generate revenu...
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
If it comes from The New York Times or The Washington Post, then it is extremely unlikely that it will contain anything that interests me.
I see very little long-term benefit to Google from this, and I see a lot of potentially pissed off users who do not want to be spoon fed NYT or WP crap. Seriously, anyone can find whatever news sources one wants today on the net. Why the hell would I want to have that crap shoved into my face every time I want to do a search?
I will bet you within weeks of Google launching this idiocy, someone will write an add-on for Firefox to block it.
End anonymous moderation and posting on
Google is apparently planning on rolling out 'high-quality news' to users who not actively searching for news.
This to be followed by rolling out 'high-quality porn' to users who are not actively searching for porn (a small minority of google searches, to be sure.) Later, they plan to roll out V14gr4 and p3n1s enlargement ads targeted solely at women. Their new slogan: "Google... we know what you're really looking for!"
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
regardless of my syntax..?
That's not exactly how I interpreted it. I took it to mean that the news would be dished to me (along with adverts) because of what I had searched for before. Since I work in IT, that means I would get nothing but IT news when I log in at work & at home? Sorry, but I have a little trouble with force feeding. I don't have a Speedy Rewards card or any thing of the type. They are just used to find a subject that advertisers think they might make money from me. I send junk mail back to the sender in their own prepaid envelope (I'm tired of paying the trashman to haul it off). I'm also an old fart with 6 Grand kids and a GG Kid. I like my privacy and have a problem with the "Internet is everything generation". Seems a strange contradiction for an IT guy but, isn't life just a strange contradiction? :)
Why not use that tag for something useful that can aid in searching articles and what not. Pedantic bastards.
I think having such technical tags such as "typoinsummary" can be handy for analysis. It's kind of hard to think of an example right now, but it seems to me that being able to search through thousands of summaries and instantly identifying which of them contains (or contained) an error could indeed be useful in some cases.
Grammar aside, this is downright scary:
If I'm not actively searching for news it's probably because I'm not interested in news at that particular moment, whether they are high quality, sponsored or not.
It seems Google is actively trying to find exciting new ways to become annoying.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
I'm having trouble reconciling the claim:
"And on this basis, Google believes it will be able to sell premium ads against premium content."
and
"Does the New York Times make more money from this arrangement, I asked? No, Schmidt confirmed, it wonâ(TM)t. But by targeting the stories that readers will want to read, it will get more hits out of the stories it has, which will drive its traffic and ultimately support higher advertising rates beside the stories."
The premium ads he's talking about are those served by the news publisher, not Google's. Likely the service wont even have Google ads, just like news.google.com doesn't.
I'm (attempting) working on a slow dial-up connection. By "slow" here, I mean _maybe_ 5 or 10 Kb/s (according to the 'bloze "Task 'Manager'"'s Network meter, which I have no way to fracking calibrate.
This is all that the PHB will shell out for. AOHell works well enough for him (at home, on a different machine and phone line) and he sees no need for anything else. When the Boss comes in and says "hook me up to my email", he's already dismayed that I shun his AOHell, its proprietary dialer, and its (automagically launched!) Internet Exploiter, favoring instead Firefox and an AT&T account (that he got as a freebie with his web hosting deal). He has immense difficulties with the fact that "it doesn't look the same as at home". Hey, at least I got him to upgrade it to unlimited from the original 9 hrs/month. I was able to get that only by fighting him over the AOL connection for a week or so. When I dial up here, it throws him off at home, he'd redial and throw me off, etc. Can you say "counterproductive"?
I digress. My POINT is that AOHell has recently added (their) news to their main email interface webpage, complete with rotating photos to completely saturate my 5Kb connection, making it unusable unless one _immediately_ reloads the optional "low-bandwidth, basic mode" version. If Google does this too, and I cannot shut it off, it will make Google absolutely useless to me.
Excerpts from "Top Ten Things You're Likely To Hear From A Frustrated Digital Engineer":
"You _need_ a REAL Internet connection. Dial-up, particularly AOHell, does not count."
"As your digital technology consultant, I advise you to network together all those old DOS machines. It's their only hope."
"One must be ignorant, misguided, or masochistically insane to expose a Micro$oft system to the Internet."
"NO ONE should use Internet Exploiter."
And I've already been downmodded before for that last one, so flame away.
I'd also express agreement with the chap a few posts back who opined: "I'll pay attention to American news when it quits being a fucking joke".
Exceeding the recommended torque is not recommended.
Why not use that tag for something useful that can aid in searching articles and what not. Pedantic bastards.
I think having such technical tags such as "typoinsummary" can be handy for analysis. It's kind of hard to think of an example right now, but it seems to me that being able to search through thousands of summaries and instantly identifying which of them contains (or contained) an error could indeed be useful in some cases.
Maybe it's my imagination, but it seems that the number of duplicate posts has gone way down since we gained the ability to tag posts as "dupe".
Hypothetical situation which seems to pass as high quality news these days:
In news today, Paris Hilton has had another sex tape released, here's a clip of it here........
Click here to order the last Paris Hilton sex DVD 'leaked'
Take Nobody's Word For It.
What is a person and their interests? At what point does Google create a prison for a person by creating a profile that represents your interests you can't break free of? What does it say about "I" if "I" can be quantified? Does "I" ever need to break free of their profile because in reality, we all filter on an implicit profile within ourselves and it never changes. After all, the profile is about opt-out of information as much as opt-in. So, when your profile prevents information from reaching you because it is filtered out, the bars of the prison are realized. In the end, does this make you stupider?
For instance, let's say I am a person that believes that the dark ages were good and the world is flat. Will information to the contrary ever come my way if I am identified as a backward person? How would I ever become enlightened to opposing view points if I am always presented with affirming information on my world perspective.
I'm not really that interested in pornography or nudism related news. Topics of interests and what current events I follow aren't always the same.
block Fox 'News'.
If you are doing that many personal searches at work, your boss can't be that much of an A-HOLE.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Yeah, you totally caught me exaggerating for effect.
I don't really care about poker.
That said, my post was perfectly on-topic to this post which I was replying to. Unless I prefix them with "OT:", they always are. I was, of course, assuming that the reader had the wit to extrapolate out the point I was trying to make: perhaps the presence of these tags helps to improve the overall quality of submissions.
That's who.
It'll probably take a little time, but as more and more people see the high journalistic quality of papers and outlets like his relative to rags like the NYT and WaPo, the market will naturally take care of the latter papers.
Or, you know, if you're not sure you like Murdoch either, there's always USA Today.
Tweet, tweet.
I've actually been creeped out for a few years now, but no one else seems to be. I find this service to be unsettling (don't run Javascript on Google and reject cookies, so maybe it wouldn't even work), anyone else?
My conclusion: this is how the CIA will continue to pump the people in the U.S. with propaganda now that the Internet is eclipsing television.
You should try Lycos.com. They're a pretty good search engine! They have a doggie and everything!
"High quality news from the NY Times or the Washington Post"
"People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything."
Aei! The pain, you got me again! Like little pins and needles under my skin. Damn you!
it will also cross reference with my mail and Viagra will make daily headlines. can't wait!
"You are still innocent until proven guilty. What's changed is what they do to innocent people." by notnAP (846325)
Next, they'll serve news passive-aggressively:
"Heart attacks claimed more lives this year than ever before, scientists say. Not that you care. No, fine, it's not important, it's only what killed your cousin Stanley. No biggie. Don't exercise on my account."
Can't wait to see all the fishing news of Buttfuck, Idaho, which is the only thing I'm interested in.
I'll keep you posted if it sends me the bait prices the kid down the road asks.
I sure hope you are still in high school because if you are any older than 19, seek help. That or you are a brilliant troll, in which case kudos to you.
I recently noticed that after I'd logged out of the NYT, it still displayed my name.
I tried logging out again, closing the window, closing Firefox.
It still said I was logged out and still knew my name in its stupid "stalker" system.
This is getting tiresome. Not that I trusted logging off or signing out to really work.
But damn.
I foresee a slant against stories that don't bring in ad revenue. And how could anyone ever prove it, with scads of data-driven logic making the decision of what you see and what you don't. At least if I'm doing the filtering myself, I know what I've chosen not to read.
I'm taking bets on how long it will be in "Beta"
My money is on at LEAST 10 years...
apply ever more sophisticated filtering â" based on search words, user choices, purchases, a whole host of cues â" to determine what the reader is looking for without knowing they're looking for it
This kind of pre-filtered content is not news it is more of the old stuff that I'm already interested in.
Part of the appeal of a news paper or other news publication is to alert me to something that I'm not thinking of anyway. For example would you have thought of "swine flu" three weeks ago?
I also don't understand the appeal from the perspective of a search engine. News probably should be part of my search results for the keywords I'm, looking for. But in order for it to really be useful allow me to tell in my search if I want new answers over old established one's. One search of mine might be looking for news another might be for historic records. An automatic bias for news is rather hindering in the second search request. And pages don't add a keyword "old" or "historic" to themselves just because they have been published a few years ago. Hell, way to many online organizations (blogs, etc.) don't even feel it is appropriate to post a publishing date to their post.)
Busy helping non technical users of OpenOffice.org - http://plan-b-for-openoffice.org/
Passive exposure to propaganda. I say sweet!