Google Noows

Submitted by James P Caldwell on December 7, 2005 - 10:08pm.

Today Air Marshalls shot and killed a 44-year-old man on an American Airlines flight at a gate at Miami International Airport. It was the first time Air Marshalls have used their guns since 9/11, Department of Homeland Security spokesman Brian Doyle confirmed in the Times.

The presence of Air Marshall's on domestic flights has steadily increased since 2001 amid concerns from some groups that guns on planes is a plain bad idea.

Point being, big news. Front page news.

One of the interesting things about Google News is what sources they tap for their lead stories. They give you hundreds of choices if it's a big story like this one, but they lede with one news source for the headline.

This evening, for this story they chose Aljazeera.net.

Now, without starting a holy war (if you'll pardon the expression) about the integrity of Aljazeera as a news source, it's my opinion that Google News should filter out news outlets who's coverage of an important story like this is, say, about a country mile from "unbiased."

Among a bunch of other problems, nowhere does it reference eyewitness accounts, reported in many papers, that the man claimed he had a bomb.

We don't need to walk through every way in which the Aljazeera article isn't quite balanced. It's obvious, and more to the point, not the point.

The fact that the man was no threat and was killed is tragic. The fact that he was mentally ill makes it even worse.

And Google News should headline stories of this importance with better news sources than Aljazeera.net. No, not Western sources exclusively (hell, screw the New York Times; clock them in at number 387.)

But outlets that are at least in the ballpark of fair and balanced:

That's what Google News should choose to use.

Michelle Crowley @ December 8, 2005 - 10:15am

I could be completely wrong, but I always thought that whatever source has the most recent story would be on the google news homepage. The reason I think this is because it will always say how long ago the story was posted, and often one that was posted "2 hours ago" will get replaced by another source when there is a newer one.

I also think (could be wrong again) that there is no hierarchy of news sources on google news, and I really like that about it.

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Anonymous (not verified) @ December 8, 2005 - 10:26am

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Erica Martinson @ December 8, 2005 - 3:41pm

I'm fairly sure you're right, Michelle. (We'll just skip over Mr. Anonymous there....) The stories change on Google as they roll in, so if you want to see it break, you've got to go back to the beginning. I often see some po-dunk newspaper or Web Site headlining whatever issue is at hand. I always click on "see all 3495837459 stories" to pick which one I'd like to read. (You can easily see when an AP story rolls out this way-- there'll be 50 stories in succession with exactly the same headline. It's an interesting way to find who decided to run the AP of a more obscure event.)

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Josh (not verified) @ December 11, 2005 - 9:30pm

Actually, Google News is run entirely on an algorithm, with no human intervention (read the about page here. I imagine that the news algorithm somewhat mirrors the search algorithm, which means that links to an article or news source are major players in what gets ranked high, as are recency and the appearance of certain keywords. This is why you'll often see papers like the Kansas City Star ranked among the top three in certain story lists. Plus, once the stories appear high and bloggers start linking to them, they get boosted in the rankings.

Now, Google News is posing something of a problem for some researchers, as are other news aggregators. I co-authored a study last spring in which we asked respondents to a survey questionnaire if they often visited the same news sites, and here's a problem we found: if you use Google News, you're not necessarily even selecting the news sites you're reading. You might use Google News four times a day, and you'll only remember visiting Google News. But you didn't read any stories on Google News. You might have read stories from Indianapolis, New Delhi, Sydney and San Louis Obispo, and you didn't even notice. It just happened that those are what you clicked on without looking.

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