NP google news

[barbara100 at jps.net]

Contents for Holt Uncensored #347  Friday, October 18, 2002 

THE NEW 'GOOGLE NEWS' - REVOLUTIONARY OR ORWELLIAN?  MISSING THE POINT (AGAIN) ABOUT INDEPENDENT BOOKSTORES  LETTERS 

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THE NEW 'GOOGLE NEWS' - REVOLUTIONARY OR ORWELLIAN? 

Wow. Something big is happening over at Google that may revolutionize  the way we read about the news, deepen our understanding of events,  achieve an international perspective or just click on and off to see  what's happening in the news from many different angles on a  minute-by-minute basis. 

Launched earlier this month, the beta version of Google News at  http://news.google.com/ offers a home page that looks like many other  mainstream news sites on the Internet. The difference is that on other  sites, if you want to know more, you're dependent on the host - say the  New York Times, CNET or UPI - to link you to more sources within the  site. 

At the new Google News, while a news story on the page may be reported  by CNN, the BBC, the Miami Herald or Reuters, that's just the lead-off.  Below each item, Google News offers hundreds of other sources across the  world, all reporting the same story from their own, often very different  perspectives. 

More important, what you get at Google News is the latest news with  timed updates ("8 hours ago," "15 minutes ago"), and the luxury of  taking nobody's word for it, because not a single editor at Google  makes a decision about any news item you see. Instead, through an  "automated grouping process," Google's search engines are continuously  crawling through 4,000 news sites to pull out and package the news  according to a priority of importance, determined by volume. 

Oh-oh, you may say (I certainly did say): *No* editor at all? Right,  this is news "untouched by human hands," as Dan Rubenstein of Vue Weekly  reported last week (reprinted by Alternet at  http://www.alternet.org/print.html?StoryID

14239 ). 

The reason: Google News comes from a newly developed set of computer  algorithms that look for "stories generating a large volume of Internet  'buzz,' " says Rubenstein. These stories are displayed the most  prominently at Google News, "according to the algorithms' rather  democratic whims," 

Ah, "democratic," that's a comforting word. As Google explains it,  "while the sources of the news vary in perspective and editorial  approach, their selection for inclusion is done without regard to  political viewpoint or ideology." 

Here's how it works, as Rubenstein reports: Earlier this month,  demonstrators protested at World Bank and International Monetary Fund  meetings in Washington, D.C. As usual, the protests were portrayed  according to the "deeply subjective" way editors make choices according  to the biases of their newspapers, wire services or magazines. 

For example, the news story at the Globe and Mail, says Rubenstein,  "contained a swath of derisive comments like 'The same folks who earlier  brought you tear gas festivals in Seattle, Quebec City, Genoa and  elsewhere are back.' " 

Coverage at The Guardian took the opposite tack: "The International  Monetary Fund admitted yesterday that the benefits of the increasing  integration of the global economy had failed to reach the world's poor  as demonstrators gathered in Washington." 

Even The Motley Fool had its own angle, as shown in its "top 10 ways  capitalism is fighting back": "9. Drenched and shivering on Pennsylvania  Ave., several protestors are spotted heading to Starbucks for a hot  double latte." 

So the presence of editors is very much felt at Google News once you  start reading each news source's angle on each event. "We like to say  we have thousands of editors," Google News team leader Krishna Bharat  told Vue Weekly. "We look at their collected wisdom and how much time  and space they invest in a certain topic." 

The danger, of course, lies in the possibility that somebody at Google  may develop these algorithms to cut out a certain kind of news source -  let's say radical feminist vegetarian socialists, of which, I must say,  not many representatives were quoted in the Google News sources I read. 

But like so many services on the Web, the feeling that we're all in the  same boat often provides its own checks and balances. If a radical  feminist vegetarian socialist news site wants to be included, the group  can contact news-feedback at google.com and hope "the algorithms' rather  democratic whims" will find a place for it. 

"The algorithms are trying to create diversity," Bharat says. "We're  trying to be as objective as possible." Hey, that sounds like a good  news editor talking: "The intention is to have a healthy debate, so you  try to include a good mix...Some of the best newspapers, even in the  U.S., have strong opinions. So you have newspapers and opinions from all  over the world." 

I love that idea that "strong opinions" exist "even in the U.S.," home  of corporate ownership and ensuing blandness. Thanks to Google, we get  to see at a glance more different points of view in our own country than  we may have known before. 

True, the concept of Google News has a long way to go - many of the  "different stories" are the same wire service piece printed by different  newspapers; not enough of a "healthy mix" is found in Google's endless  links; a greater variety of international stories should be displayed on  the front page; the graphics need vast improvement. 

But as a way of fulfilling that great hope of the Internet - siphoning  the World Wide Web into an online newspaper of the world, updated on a  minute-by-minute basis - Google News may be a giant first step.