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Google Does the News

Posted by CmdrTaco on Mon Sep 23, 2002 09:25 AM
from the hey-mister-wanna-buy-the-paper dept.
The Internet
rizen was among the countless readers who submitted that google does the news. They've added a new tab to their interface, and a CNNish sorta web page that indexes thousands of online news sites. Their technology section is showing some Slashdot stories too (sweet!). I like that they combine related stories on the same subject. Nifty setup.
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  • Why do slashdot stories? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2002, @09:28AM (#4311298)
    technology section is showing some Slashdot stories too (sweet!).

    I don't see why they would. They probably already posted the article Slashdot is linking to before slashdot posts the story.

    Slashdot isn't a news site as much as a community site. Most articles are just pointing to real news sites. Its the comments that gives this site the edge.

  • Ooo, irony (Score:5, Funny)

    by Winterblink (575267) on Monday September 23 2002, @09:28AM (#4311307) Homepage
    New news makes the news. *snicker*

  • Sweetness and light... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Bonker (243350) on Monday September 23 2002, @09:29AM (#4311309)
    I can load relevant headlines without waiting for my browser to time out on CNN's AOL/Netscape banner every time.

    Still, I wonder how the other news sources are going to react. They make their revenue on advertisting and if Google is skimming off the top of their viewership, I have to wonder if they're not going to start kvetching pretty quickly.

    • Re:Sweetness and light... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Quaryon (93318) on Monday September 23 2002, @09:35AM (#4311379)
      Well, Google only links to headlines at other sites, rather than publishing the articles themselves - so I suspect there will soon be a race by each of these sites to figure out how to get the top article in each section..!

      Q.

    • Re:Sweetness and light... (Score:4, Informative)

      by greenhide (597777) <jordanslashdotNO@SPAMcvilleweekly.com> on Monday September 23 2002, @09:55AM (#4311560)
      These types of links are called deep links [selu.edu].

      There has already been quite [journalism.co.uk] a lot [wired.com] of controversy [searchenginewatch.com] regarding deep links, dating all the way back to 1999 [salon.com].

      In fact, one major free website hosting company, whose name escapes me at the moment, does not allow you to deep link to their members' pages. Instead, you are forced to go to that member's home page first (I imagine that they are checking for referers or some such thing).

      Clearly, deep linking is beneficial [useit.com], but some companies just don't get it.

      • Re:Sweetness and light... (Score:5, Informative)

        by p3d0 (42270) on Monday September 23 2002, @10:18AM (#4311759)
        Deep linking is also bullshit. It's called "linking" and it's no different from linking to a home page. It's just a URL. There appears to be no basis [selu.edu] to think that any kind of linking is illegal in any way.

        If companies want to force viewers through a predetermined path, the web is simply the wrong medium.

    • I know I had never used some of the sites that I was reading from just a minute ago until I stumbled upon news.google.com . So, I figure in the end a lot of sites are only going to garner new hits?
    • I'm guessing Google still respects this, so it's pretty simple to stop it from deep linking...
    • Have you noticed that the file extension on the Netscape toolbar is "twhat"? How friggin' perfect is that? I can't believe the person who came up with that didn't read it the way I read it.

      RP

  • Slashdot need to license this! (Score:5, Funny)

    by DAldredge (2353) <SlashdotEmail@GMail.Com> on Monday September 23 2002, @09:29AM (#4311317) Journal
    That dup detection code would do wonders to help slashdot. Any chance that Google will license it to /. ?

  • Regions (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nick255 (139962) on Monday September 23 2002, @09:30AM (#4311318)
    At the moment it has World and U.S. sections. I think what it could really do with is different regional sections, which would be default to different regions URLs. (eg. news.google.co.uk having a UK section). It really doesn't interest me that much that South Dakota is to vote on extending jury rights!

    • Re:Regions (Score:5, Funny)

      by gnovos (447128) <<ten.deppihc> <ta> <sovong>> on Monday September 23 2002, @09:51AM (#4311524) Homepage Journal
      Waaaaaaaaaitaminute... Are you honestly trying to tell me that the rest of the world doesn't wait with bated breath for any and all developments that come out of American state legislatures? Come on now, next you'll be telling me that you guys don't celebrate the Fourth of July!

    • Re:Regions (Score:4, Funny)

      by laserjet (170008) on Monday September 23 2002, @10:03AM (#4311617) Homepage
      Then why don't you limeys create your own search engine that rules? Then you can do whatever you want with it!

      (that was a joke).

    • Re:Regions (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Peyna (14792) on Monday September 23 2002, @10:12AM (#4311694) Homepage
      It would be even better if they offered more stories from news sources arond the world. I've noticed in the past that if I read a story on CNN.com [cnn.com], and then go read it on El Mundo [elmundo.es] or Le Monde [lemonde.fr] that you tend to get a very different point of view. Especially with stories that look at the United States or International issues. A real good example was the recent problems in Argentina and how the US news presented it, and how international news sources presented it.
      • It would be even better if they offered more stories from news sources arond the world. I've noticed in the past that if I read a story on CNN.com, and then go read it on El Mundo or Le Monde that you tend to get a very different point of view.

        I agree with you. I think this would be a very nice addition to the site. You should suggest that to them.

        In the meantime, you want World News Review [worldnewsreview.com].
      • What would be even better is link up that with their translation service, so I could get the American/British/Spanish/Whatever point of view in my native language (French in my case). Even if it would be a bit difficult to grasp the writers' ideas through the brain-damaged junk outputted by the translation software. Still, just having localized news pages (like the other services) would be great for a start. I encourage you to write to them about that.

  • Clean look and good international support (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Bravo_Two_Zero (516479) on Monday September 23 2002, @09:30AM (#4311321)
    I know lots of news pages exist, but this is nice and clean. Plus, they seem to have a good amount of international news. I can see using this every day. Plus, it's nice not to be beaten over the head with layers, flash and such. Imagine that... just the news!

    • Re:Clean look and good international support (Score:4, Insightful)

      by d^2b (34992) on Monday September 23 2002, @10:26AM (#4311820) Homepage
      Hmm. I know its not cool to pick on people's English when you don't speak their language, but living in Munich I was amused by the following quote from the Islamic Republic News Agency
      "This government will only govern for a very short time," Stoiber told his disappointing supporters at a gathering in Munich, broadcast live on German television.
      I mean, hey, Bavarians are a unique bunch, but disappointing seems a bit harsh, especially during Oktoberfest :->

      Seriously though, I wonder just how the IRNA one paragraph story got to be number two on the list of sources.

      B.T.W., and this is probably redundant, but if you think slashdotting is cool, wait till google news points at your community newspaper.

  • Methodology? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Spazholio (314843) <{ten.laxel} {ta} {todhsals}> on Monday September 23 2002, @09:33AM (#4311355) Homepage
    I thought Google's indexing/spidering system was innovative because it ranked pages in terms of how popular and prevalent they are on OTHER pages. I would think that it takes a small amount of time for this kind of "popularity" to build up. Are they changing their methods for the news section? Using their traditional methods, it wouldn't be "news" anymore. Is it just taking the headlines from the most popular websites and posting them there? Don't get me wrong, Google's the best at what it does, so this will probably end up being a good thing, I'm just curious about the methodologies employed.

    • About News Search (Score:5, Informative)

      by overunderunderdone (521462) on Monday September 23 2002, @12:39PM (#4312790)
      It doesn't say much but their is an FAQ [google.com]

      The most it says about the technology is this:
      How does Google decide what stories are published on the Google News homepage?

      The headlines on the Google News homepage are selected entirely by a computer algorithm, based on many factors including how often and on what sites a story appears elsewhere on the web. This is very much in the tradition of Google's web search, which relies heavily on the collective judgment of web publishers to determine which sites offer the most valuable and relevant information. Google News relies in a similar fashion on the editorial judgment of online news organizations to determine which stories are most deserving of inclusion and prominence on the Google News page.
      I'm guessing that the sources themselves are ranked in the usual manner. The same story from different sources are grouped and finally the placement of the story is determined by how many sources (weighted by their rank) ran it and how those sources positioned it themselves.

  • the best part (Score:5, Funny)

    by briancnorton (586947) on Monday September 23 2002, @09:33AM (#4311358) Homepage
    the best part of it is that Cricket is the headlining sport.

  • Meta (Score:5, Funny)

    by interiot (50685) on Monday September 23 2002, @09:35AM (#4311377) Homepage
    GoogleNews does GoogleNews [google.com].

  • Well done... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by truesaer (135079) on Monday September 23 2002, @09:35AM (#4311380) Homepage
    This even has my college newspaper. Normally that wouldn't be much of a feature, but they do have coverage of our football team that no one else has. So I'm fairly impressed. The timestamp when the articles were spidered was really nice as well.


    This is a long overdue feature....its automatic, robust, and I've often wanted to read another take on the same issue when I've read a news article. I hope that they have it set up to filter out all the repeated AP articles that are on 2 zillion different websites. But I'm guessing they did, it would just be similar to filering out similar results in general searches.

  • Hang on a second... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Soko (17987) on Monday September 23 2002, @09:38AM (#4311419) Homepage
    Their technology section is showing some Slashdot stories too (sweet!).

    What if Google links to this story? Then you get the Slashdot slashdotting Google, who will slashdot Slashdot, who will bounce it to Google, who will bounce it back to Slashdot, who will retur*Runtime error: Endless recursive loop encountered, stack overflow. Brain dump follows.*

    Heh. Bandwidth firefights - this oughta be cool. Nifty setup indeed!

    Soko

  • Been beta for a while (Score:5, Informative)

    by salimma (115327) on Monday September 23 2002, @09:41AM (#4311436) Homepage Journal
    .. it's just linked to the main page now. For something extra-schweet though, try their experimental keyboard-navigable [google.com] search interface - found it from Mycroft [mozdev.org], the Mozilla search bar plugin project.

  • Just a suggestion (Score:3, Insightful)

    by nicedream (4923) <brian@nopRASPants.org minus berry> on Monday September 23 2002, @09:44AM (#4311464) Homepage
    Maybe since slashdot's stories are being picked up by a big news site, this would be a good time to implement some spelling/grammar/fact checkers.

  • Nope, no good.. (Score:4, Funny)

    by Boss, Pointy Haired (537010) on Monday September 23 2002, @09:47AM (#4311491)
    news://news.google.com/alt.binaries.erotica

    Connection failed. :o(

  • It's been Around for a While (Score:5, Informative)

    by Schlemphfer (556732) on Monday September 23 2002, @09:48AM (#4311495) Homepage

    I'm surprised nobody seems to have known this , but Google has been offering news searches for something like the past six months, at news.google.com. The only things that have changed are now there's a tag on Google's front page, and the front news page now features an attractive layout and contains graphics from stories.

    Google's primary news-search feature has been available for I think well over six months. I've been using Google news as my primary news searcher ever since it came out. On its first day, I spent an hour or so comparing it to yahoo's news search engine [yahoo.com], and I found Google's search was way better. I especially like that, when you do a news search, you can choose between having returned items listed according to relevancy or according to date. When you sort by date for any kind of common news story, you can often find great items that have been published within the past hour.

    Two more things of interest. First, even though the news search is now available on google's front page, the site still says that the engine is in beta. Second, the reason I found out about Google's news engine right when it came out is I frequently visit researchbuzz.com [researchbuzz.com], which always seems to have the scoop on the latest internet search technologies.

  • I don't like it (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Mattygfunk1 (596840) on Monday September 23 2002, @09:53AM (#4311544) Homepage
    As much as I respect google, I for one am not happy to hear the news (no pun intended). In my opinion google has built an indredible userbase by supplying the top quality search service with a simple UI, and stood out because it was not a portal wanna be.

    I am worried that google will loose focus on the primary reason that people go there, and the search service will suffer because of it. Fair enough that the service will be usefull, but when you're on top you need to work twice as hard on your primary product to stay there.

    ----

    omg it's wallpaper australia [wallpaperscoverings.com]!

  • Historical article... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by pVoid (607584) on Monday September 23 2002, @09:54AM (#4311554)
    This thing is like Escher's hand drawing itself:

    Google searches for the news [com.com]
    ZDNet- 1hourago
    Google unveiled on Monday an expanded test version of its search engine for current events and news, the latest step in the company's move into new markets.
    Google Launches News Service [pcworld.com]PCWorld
    Google launches news search site [paper.nl]TelecomPaper(subscription)
    CNET [com.com]- and5related [slashdot.org]

  • read on the bottom... (Score:5, Funny)

    by elquemao (610791) on Monday September 23 2002, @09:56AM (#4311573)
    " This page was generated entirely by computer algorithms without human editors. No humans were harmed or even used in the creation of this page."

  • I was just saying... (Score:5, Funny)

    by tuxedo-steve (33545) on Monday September 23 2002, @10:04AM (#4311627)
    I was just saying to my girlfriend that if there's any one company that I have more respect for than any other company in the world, it would be Google.

    And then this came out. I got to point and say, "See, this is why!" Then I ran around the room in my underwear laughing maniacally. I think I'm sleeping on the couch tonight.

  • How are sites selected for each story? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by tibbetts (7769) <jason.tibbetts@net> on Monday September 23 2002, @10:09AM (#4311672) Homepage Journal

    From Google's "About Google News [google.com]" link:

    The headlines that appear on Google news are selected entirely by computer algorithms, based on how and where the stories appear elsewhere on the web. There are no human editors at Google selecting or grouping the headlines and no individual decides which stories get top placement. This occasionally results in some articles appearing to be out of context.

    This is an interesting development for Google. Ruling out the possibility of paid placement (for now), it seems as though PageRank [google.com] doesn't apply to the news aggregator. (And how would it? Stories are updated continuously.) It's not likely to be completely random, either, although such an approach could lead to some very interesting story angles.

  • Just in case ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Alranor (472986) on Monday September 23 2002, @10:18AM (#4311756)
    we slashdot the site, here's [216.239.35.100] a link to the google cache. :)

  • Mozilla Crashing (Score:3, Informative)

    by Skidge (316075) on Monday September 23 2002, @10:19AM (#4311768) Homepage
    Anyone else having problems with Mozilla (1.1) on the Google News site? Twice now I have had to reboot my Win98 machine after Mozilla crashed hard while I was scrolling down the Sci/Tech page. It has me a little gun-shy about revisiting the site, at least with Mozilla.

  • Sneak preview of upcoming Googlage (Score:5, Informative)

    by bmooney28 (537716) on Monday September 23 2002, @10:58AM (#4312067) Homepage
    It has been mentioned that Google has covered news stories for quite some time. The best place to get info on Google's current projects is Google Labs... [google.com]

  • Slashgoo (Score:4, Interesting)

    by zero-one (79216) <jonathanwilliampayne.gmail@com> on Monday September 23 2002, @11:41AM (#4312378) Homepage
    Slashdot is a site for commenting on the news, news.google.com finds the news. What about combining them to make a fully automated news discussion site? All the server would have to do is pick off the top n stories from Google news and feed them into the slash engine (or one of the slash cones). For bonus points, it could divide the news into different areas of interest. Anyone care to lend me some nice fast servers on with a fast Internet connection?
      • Are you saying that we could replace all the Slashdot users with a simple Perl script? In fact, perhaps someone has done this already and I am the only real person. Ahhh.... Maybe I am a Perl script too.

  • Hm (Score:3, Informative)

    by zapfie (560589) on Monday September 23 2002, @12:18PM (#4312663)

    In case you didn't know, you can see all the latest stuff Google is working on here [google.com].

    Check it out.

  • Exellent! But.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jonr (1130) on Monday September 23 2002, @01:59PM (#4313414) Homepage Journal
    Would it be possible to localize it more? Right now it is -1, Too US-Centric [kuro5hin.org]. This could be my startup page. :)

  • Figures (Score:3, Insightful)

    by guttentag (313541) on Monday September 23 2002, @02:13PM (#4313508) Journal
    Late last night I finally uploaded my news aggregator, "Buddy: Your Digital Retriever [sourceforge.net]," to SourceForge. So as luck would have it, Google had to choose today to pseudo-launch its news feature.

    I've been aware of the Beta for some time. The search feature has been great, but the portal left much to be desired. It was basically a cluttered list of five sources for each news story. This new layout seems better, though it still leaves me wondering which stories are supposed to be the most newsworthy. And I see a fundamental problem with Google's approach.

    Taking a cross section of all the news that's out there is not going to result in good coverage. One of the big differences between a good newspaper, like The New York Times, and a poor one, like The New York Daily News, is the collection of stories the editors choose. The Daily News needs to get its readers fired up to sell papers, so it covers the most provocative stories it can find and sensationalizes them. The Times has the luxury of knowing its readers trust it to inform them of the most important news.

    I know it sounds like an elitist position -- "we know what's best for you." I was once accosted at a party by a USA Today employee who began ranting about how arrogant it was of my paper to assume people wanted to read about human rights abuses in Africa. I asked him what we should be featuring and he detailed a series of articles his paper ran on business travellers who get laid by stewardesses at 30,000 feet. I didn't argue with him, but I felt somewhat more confident that we were choosing the right stories.

    If Google covers the news based on what's out there (which is primarily of the USA Today variety), as opposed to applying news values, its offering won't be very informative. It may appeal to the largest number of people who confuse entertainment with news, but I think most Slashdotters will find it very shallow.

    There's also the question of Google's "partnerships" with news sites and how that will affect the rankings.

    While I still like the news search feature, I prefer the collection of shell scripts I just released. They grab the top headlines and blurbs from a number of major newspapers and put them together on one page, organized by newspaper, so you can browse "trusted" news sites quickly without having to wade through cumbersome javascript navigations, flash ads, registration. You still visit the newspapers' Web sites to read the stories that interest you, but this way you get to check out the merchandise before you commit to jumping through the content owner's hoops.

    My aggregator also provides updated lists of all the headlines that have appeared on the wire services in the last several hours. The editors at the news sites are watching these same lists for updates when breaking news occurs... even the major sites that have a large number of reporters. They can't cover everything themselves, and they need to have some coverage until their reporter can get to the story.

    It also covers computer news sites like Slashdot (note: the list is currently very Mac-centric because the shell scripts require Curl [curl.haxx.se] to trick servers into thinking the download program is a Web browser... I'll try to do the same with wget for Linux, but that's not ready yet), grabs sports scores, the weather report, comic strips, and fetches slippers.

    If you're using Mac OS X, or you're willing to install Curl on your Linux box, give it a try. It's free and it's open source.

    • Re:google's great, but.... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by theRhinoceros (201323) on Monday September 23 2002, @09:30AM (#4311322)
      As long as it's better* than msn, excite, yahoo or the like, yes.

      *bett er - adj Does not have insanely annoying banner ads everywhere, nor advertisements disguised as headlines, or random flash popups or interstitial ads.

    • They already do (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2002, @09:34AM (#4311364)
      maybe time for slashdot to get a google topic

      They already have one. It's called "Ask Slashdot"

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