Forum Moderators: open

Message Too Old, No Replies

Google News and the current world situation

         

salson

9:50 pm on Mar 19, 2003 (gmt 0)



Hello.

Does anybody know how Google is to cover the attack on Iraq? Are they to include any news section on the results (as on Sep 11th)?

chiyo

6:22 am on Mar 22, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



rfgdxm1

not disagreeing with you at all. Its hard to argue that Google.news does not provide one of the most "fair" coverages of all aggregators. Daypop etc come close, in a different way, but the latter does, by nature, have a strong bias to US commentators who are enthusistic and talkative enough to run news and blog sites! And the lack of foreign language sites means we have limited access to commentary from non-Snglish sites, (if we wanted to translate them!) and that i think would produce some bias in this case.

Just pointing out that its impossible to be 100% objective.

But i agree with you 100%

chiyo

6:22 am on Mar 22, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



rfgdxm1

not disagreeing with you at all. Its hard to argue that Google.news does not provide one of the most "fair" coverages of all aggregators. Daypop etc come close, in a different way, but the latter does, by nature, have a strong bias to US commentators who are enthusistic and talkative enough to run news and blog sites! And the lack of foreign language sites means we have limited access to commentary from non-Snglish sites, (if we wanted to translate them!) and that i think would produce some bias in this case.

Just pointing out that its impossible to be 100% objective.

But i agree with you 100%

europeforvisitors

7:24 am on Mar 22, 2003 (gmt 0)



Stefan wrote:

And anyway, europeforvisitor's post was about how unbiased it is...

Precisely. And not only is Google News unbiased; it's also a delightfully eclectic grab bag of topics and stories. I might visit to read the latest headlines on Iraq and find myself distracted by a blurb about a newly discovered asteroid or the British Royal Family's latest run-in with the tabloids.

Of course, I'd like Google News even better if it could be customized with a tabbed interface that would provide access to multiple languages and topics such as politics, science, entertainment, etc. But maybe it's just as well that Google News is just one page: If it offered an even wider range of blurbs and links, I'd never get any work done.

martinibuster

8:42 am on Mar 22, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Another instance of GoogleNews usefulness:

My co-workers and I were worried about getting home to San Francisco over the Golden Gate Bridge because of a possible Code Red Alert, a scenario under which it is rumoured that the bridge would be shut down, and we would be stranded.

I did a search on G-News for "Code Red" and received quite a number of great results. My co-workers were quite impressed.

Tapolyai

3:14 pm on Mar 22, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



What I wonder about is - does Google News uses a dictionary, or uses just word frequency within a headline.

i.e. Does Google News was looking for nouns like "war", or just saw the word "war" more frequently then others and ranks it accordingly. The later would allow to expand the news to foreign language news sources. On the other hand, with a dictionary you could do more "global" view, since you could lump the stats for "war", "guerra", "guerre", "Krieg", "战争", "전쟁", etc. together.

GoogleGuy

5:13 pm on Mar 22, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Tapolyai, Google News only handles English articles right now, but they do some pretty sophisticated analysis to figure out which articles are important and which articles are related and should form a cluster. There aren't any hard-coded words or anything like that, so most if not all of the analysis could work in any language.
This 66 message thread spans 3 pages: 66