Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/09/12/google-says-they-changed-news.html
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Look for a spike in vanity awards and fictional news stories in 3…2…1…
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Does this mean that they’ll stop pushing as many far right loon “news sources” to my phone?
(Oath Keepers? Really?)
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Be nice if teh googz gave a kickback to the original creator, and the original publisher, of that original content too.
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Google should also rank stories based on how good the author’s tweets are.
Is he being sarcastic?
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A modest start.
A serious “google news service” that really served, would report each story with a page where you could explore links:
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The original story at the top
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A branching, outline-form list of stories that used that original content, marked as being a “mere aggregator” that adds zero additional content save for a few “hey this is interesting” remarks, versus being another story that just references the original. This would clarify, every time you did a news-read, who the real journalists are, and who are the camp followers.
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Links branching off, at least from the original, if not all the echo stories, to some kind of summary (if only wikipedia) on the author and publication - are they thought to be even-handed? Biased? Which way?
…I keep getting links to publications I’ve never heard of. While it’s interesting to find a whole new news source, it would be nice to reduce effort of checking whether “climate action news” is really run by the Koch family or some such.
For that matter, like Slashdot lets you view the comments with a minimum of, say “+3” backpats from readers, I should be able to just screen out news sources that are repeat offenders at fact-checking. That whole area is obviously fraught with peril, but I think we can and must navigate the tricky waters. It’s not like “epistomology” (how do you know what you know) is a new field.
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On paper this sounds like a positive change but the execution and small print in how it actually works will be more telling. In the meantime i find myself more suspicious about this change than hopeful.
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Get ready to see a lot of of the news equivalent of the “JD Powers” award.
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Too bad. Google’s apotheosis killed off all those useless web site “awards” cluttering up pages.
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I assume, but…
A good start, but they really need to do country-specific awards. Otherwise RT and Sputnik are about to get a hell of a lot of awards from Putin and companies and industries controlled by his pet oligarchs.
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So will Google downrank sites that were awarded Mirsky’s Worst of the Web?
I suppose, given their origin, Google can’t simply admit that this can’t be done by algorithm, and then hire some of the many unemployed graduates of journalism programs who can do the job properly?
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