Google News in its short lifespan has already become the sixth most visited news site, according to Alexa Web Traffic Rankings. While its popularity can rightly be attributed to the phenomenally successful Google web search business, which funnels queries on news topics to its eponymous news site, the service itself deserves further attention.
Inside Google News
Google News is basically a news aggregation service that scours around ten thousand news sources, categorizes the articles and ranks them. What sets Google News apart from traditional news sites is that it is not monetized, as in that it doesn’t feature ads or have deals with publishers, and that it is run by a small group of about ten software engineers, rather than journalists. Google News’s popularity has attracted kudos and brickbats in equal measure. Some have criticized the service as a massive infringement of their copyrights while others have showered appreciation at its wondrous abilities that allow people to compare and contrast facts from multiple news stories quickly.
Criticisms and critiques and some suggestions
The primary criticism that has been lobbed against Google News is that it highlights “popular” stories and sources, thereby exacerbating the already large gap between popular news stories (and viewpoints) and the less popular ones. I am not particularly convinced that the above criticism is necessarily legitimate given that Google News merely mimics the information (news) and economic topography of the “real” world (which encompasses the economic underpinnings of the virtual world as in better funded sites tend to be more popular or firms more successful in real world may have better produced sites and hence may in turn attract more traffic). It does however bring into question whether Google can do better than merely mimic the topography of the world. There are of course multiple problems associated with any such venture, especially for Google, whose search algorithm is built around measuring popularity and authority of sites. The prime problem is that news is not immune to being anything more than a popularity contest shepherded by rating (euphemism for financial interests) driven news media. A look at New York Times homepage, primarily tailored to lifestyle articles, gives one an idea of the depth of the rapacity. So if Google were to venture out and produce a list of stories that were sorted by relevance to say policy, not that any such thing can be done, there is a good chance that an average user will find the news articles irrelevant. Of course, a user-determined topical selection of stories would probably be very useful for users. While numerous social scientists have issued a caveat against adopting the latter approach arguing that it may lead to further “atomization” and decline in sociotropism, I believe that their appeals are disingenuous given that specialized interest in narrowly defined topics and interests in global news can flower together.
Another criticism that has been lobbed against Google News is that it is not particularly transparent in the way it functions. Given the often abstruse and economically constrained processes that determine the content of newspapers, I don’t particularly see why Google News process is comparatively less transparent. I believe the objection primarily stems from people’s discomfort with automated processes determining the order and selection of news items. Automated processes don’t imply that they haven’t been based on adaptive systems based on criterion commonly used by editors across news rooms. More importantly, Google News works off the editorial decisions made by organizations across board, for they include details like placement and section of the article within the news site as a pointer for the relative importance of the news article. At this point we may also want to deal with the question of accountability, as pertaining to veracity of news items. Given that Google News provides a variety of news sources, it automatically provides users with a way to check for inconsistencies within and between articles. In addition, Google News relies on the fact that in this day and age, some blogger will post an erratum to a “Google News source” site, of which there are over ten thousand, and that in turn may be featured within Google News.
Let me move on to the issue of diversity of stories on a particular issue. Firstly, it is important to clarify what one means by diversity and what kind of diversity would users find most useful. Diversity can mean - diversity of locality (of publishers or date lines), view point - for or against an issue, depth - a quick summary or a large tome, media type - video or text or audio, or it can be diversity of news type (reporting versus analysis). Of course Google can circumvent all of these concerns by setting up parallel mechanisms for all the measures it deems important. For example a map/google news “mashup” can prove to be useful in highlighting where news is currently coming from. Going back to the topic of ensuring diversity - conceptual diversity is possibly the hardest to implement. There can be a multitude of angles for a story - not just for and against binary positions and facets can quickly become unruly, indefensible and unusable. For example if it splits news stories based on news sources (like liberal or conservative - people will argue over whether right categorizations were chosen or even about the labeling, for example social conservatives and fiscal conservatives) or organizations cited (for example there is a good chance that an article using statistics from Heritage foundation leans in a conservative direction but that is hardly a rule). Still I feel that these measures can prove to be helpful in at least mining for a diversity of articles on the same topic. One of the challenges of categorization is to come up with “natural” categories as in coming up with categorization that is “intuitive” for people. Given the conceptual diversity and the related abstruseness, Google may though want to preclude offering them as clickable categories to users thought it may want to use the categorization technique to display “diverse” stories. Similarly, more complex statistical measures can also prove to be useful in sub categorization, for example providing a statistical reference to the most common phrases or keywords or even Amazon like statistics on the relative hardness of reading. Google News may also just want to list the organizations cited in the news article and leave the decision of categorization to users.
To come up with ideas about how to improve Google News, one must understand what makes Google News useful? I see two important ways in which Google News is useful to its users - its ability to mine through gargantuan number of news sources and come up with a list of news stories on the same “topic” (or event), and the ability to search for a particular topic quickly. One can envision that both the user looking for a diversity of news sources or looking for quick information on a particular topic, could both be interested in other related information on the topic. More substantively, Google News may want to collate information from its web, video and image search, along with links to key organizations mentioned in the websites and put then right next to the link to the story. For example, BBC offers a related link to India’s country profile next to a story on India. Another way Google News can add value for its users is by leveraging the statistics it compiles of when and where news stories were published, stories published in the last 24 hrs or 48 hrs etc. I would love to see a feature called the “state of news” that shows statistical trends on news items getting coverage, patterns of coverage etc. (this endeavor would be similar to Google Trends)
Money: for thats what makes Spot run
Google News’ current “philanthropic” (people may argue otherwise viewing it as a publicity stunt) model is fundamentally flawed for it may restrict the money it needs to innovate and grow. Hence, it is important that it explores possible monetization opportunities. There are two possible ways to monetize Google News - developing a portal (like Yahoo) and developing tools or services that it can charge for. While Google is already forging ahead with its portal model, it has yet to make appreciable progress in offering widely incorporable tools for its Google News service. There is a strong probability that news organizations would be interested in buying a product that displays “related news items” next to news articles. This is something that Technorati already for does for blogs but there is ample room for both, additional players, and for improving the quality of the content. It would be interesting to see a product that helps display Google News results along with Google image, blog and video search results.
Conclusion
Google News is an important addition to the news landscape. Its continued success will depend on how well it is able to cater to the current and emerging needs of its user base.