Since when did letters to the editor like this - Letters: Watch out for GOP power grab - become sources of news to Google? If some pissed-off peoples’ letters can be deemed newsworthy, why not blog-rants as news sources? How low can they go?
Posted by shanti at September 9, 2003 7:42 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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Chill will you? In news.google.com scroll down to the very bottom and read what is written. The google backend is a monster application that selects news based on some algorithms that was probably written as a tribute to Knuth.
In any case 2 people can have an argument on what is news-worthy until they get blue in their faces. Its a subjective assessment according to me.
Posted by: Dilip at September 10, 2003 8:55 AM
Dilip, it is probable they are using algorithms to collate their data - but at the point of presentation, there needs to be some differentiation as to what is news and what isn’t.
True, one person’s idea of news might not fit the next person’s - that doesn’t make letters to the editor news by anyone’s standard. These letters are nothing but a layman’s opinion some news published in the paper - what makes them newsworthy enough to put them in the top news section?
Posted by: Shanti at September 10, 2003 8:59 AM
Really… how do you know that the guy who wrote that letter is a “layman”? For all you know he could be some freaking scholar of some hi-fi think tank. And since when did intellectual capability become a litmus test for voicing one’s opinion and since when did Google’s news section undertake to publish only “news worthy” items?
Regardless you keep missing the point. There are no human factors involved in selecting the news category. Only humans can decide (stupidly i might add) what according to them is worthy of front page attention. A software application can only take into consideration statistical evidence like how many hits that webpage has generated or how many external websites have referenced that page etc. and based on that come to an conclusion. Probably they have a bug somewhere.
Otherwise I do feel you are shooting in the dark…
Posted by: Dilip at September 10, 2003 9:51 AM
Dilip, “news” is exactly what is - a reporting of facts (theoretically), with no built-in editorials - opinions are not news - it isn’t that hard to distinguish between the two. I think Google News is a great service that use several times daily to check on things - if this is a bug, I wish Google would fix it. How else would we bring it to Google’s notice if we didn’t talk about it?
Posted by: Shanti at September 10, 2003 9:55 AM
Thought that I’d try Google News as a home page, second day the very first ‘news’ item was a piece from an op-ed page. So much for that idea.
Posted by: JSAllison at September 10, 2003 11:51 AM
My point exactly, Allison - I love the way Google aggregates news from hundreds of sources, but they can do better.
Posted by: Shanti at September 10, 2003 12:09 PM