Are Google News’ Bots Biased?
One of my readers sent me this short Wired piece that looks at bias in Google News’ bots. I was hoping the bias would talk about how Google favors blogs over other kinds of sites and how that might creep into the news sources returned in search results. Instead, the bias is a political bias.
Krishna Bharat of Google News says the engine’s strength is in the variety of sources it returns. He sees it as a supplement to people’s news reading.
December 10th, 2004 at 9:03 pm
My pet peeve about Google News is that it doesn’t geographically weight the stories on its home page. For example, when Johnny Cash died, our paper here in Nashville had blowout coverage, with historical slideshows, timelines, etc. But I believe that Google news featured wire coverage from some other paper elsewhere in the country. Personally, I think they should come up with a way to give the most emphasis to sources that are close to where the event happened, since these sources are likely to have better coverage. Seems like you could probably do this in an automated way by examining datelines and place names that show up in stories.
I sent this suggestion to them a long time ago, but I don’t think they’ve done anything about it.
December 11th, 2004 at 9:24 am
Hey NK, I think that’s a great suggestion! It’d probably be a bit of a challenge to teach the technology how to recognize that Johnny Cash is associated with Nashville (or anyone is associated with any particular place, etc.). A giant taxonomy, perhaps? Linked GPS coordinates?