Google News Initiative

https://newsinitiative.withgoogle.com/

by artsandsci • 8 years ago

223 163 8 years ago

newsinitiative.withgoogle.com

daxaxelrod• 8 years ago

Is the css showing a 404 for anyone else?

thisisit• 8 years ago

CSS is showing 404 for me too.

kyrra3• 8 years ago

EDIT: It looks like there were 3 blog posts by Google announcing this initiative.

Blog posts announcing Google News Initative: https://www.blog.google/topics/google-news-initiative/announ...

Subscription payments feature: https://www.blog.google/topics/google-news-initiative/introd...

Elevating quality journalism: https://www.blog.google/topics/google-news-initiative/elevat...

Some news coverage on it: https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/20/17142788/google-news-init...

kosei• 8 years ago

Based on the blog article, it seems like the main thing they're trying to solve is the payment system (use Google payment to easily subscribe). If that's true, it's a much different and less exciting offer than the OP's linked page which seemed like a much larger initiative.

kyrra3• 8 years ago

Edited the original comment, thanks for pointing that out. It looks like there were 3 blog posts from Google about the whole thing.

danso3• 8 years ago

The subscription system sounds like it's one part of this initiative. And if it is indeed the "main thing" then I think we should give Google some credit for being serious with this initiative. A payments system is a boring problem but it is the one most core to news organizations' current existential problems. It's not as sexy as using NLP to categorize news archives perhaps, but it's the most important to news orgs' survival.

brlewis• 8 years ago

Good to see in that third link that they're still interested in fact checking. I wasn't sure if this was going to be abandoned: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15528824

howenterprisey• 8 years ago

What's the point of the withgoogle.com domain?

2aa07e2• 8 years ago

It gives a partnership vibe, in contrast to the default "we are using you" one.

advisedwang• 8 years ago

google.com is a valuable target for XSS attacks. Keeping content off this domain reduces the attack surface.

adtac• 8 years ago

I too think this is the reason. It does, however, allow for cool domains like https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com

Hurdy• 8 years ago

This kind of marketing content is often provided by an agency. Hosting it on google.com where users are logged in would require extremely strict security reviews.

haldean• 8 years ago

It's the domain they use when an engineering team doesn't make the website; this was probably made by a marketing team, so it doesn't go on google.com.

inetknght4• 8 years ago

I used Google News for a long time. I have since blackholed it on all of my machines. By tailoring the news articles presented to be based on the interests that Google data mined from my Google profile, it became an echo chamber even worse than Facebook.

It became a very bad source of news: all of the articles were self-reinforcing each other with very very little actual diversity of sources.

jacksmith210068• 8 years ago

Could not disagree more. I am generally pretty liberal but get news stories from Breitbart, Fox news, etc all the time in my feed.

I like to read all sides so love this aspect of Google news. Heck I get negative Google stories from Google. Can't ask for more neutral.

Bartweiss3• 8 years ago

Is there some feedback feature or something you use to get a helpful range of stories?

My experience with Google News isn't so much bias or a bubble as uselessness. Source quality, comprehensiveness, and coverage depth seem totally irrelevant, like I'm just getting a feed of every news site a bunch of people clicked on recently. It's the same stuff as Facebook's trending bar, at about the same level of shallow and unfocused.

And occasionally, it seems like a major story is incompatible with my profile, or has a keyword collision with other topics, or something, and so disappears almost completely.

I tried Google News and Google Now with real eagerness, but my experience with both of them was just shockingly low quality.

AJRF• 8 years ago

Wow you really, REALLY like Google based on your comment history

specialist2• 8 years ago

The remedy to information overload (spam) is better filters.

I demand the filter bubble that we were promised.

We live in an attention economy. My most valuable resource is my time.

The inclusion of trog media is precisely why I won't use Google News. I couldn't figure out how to exclude it.

What little benefit Google News, Twitter, Facebook provide is more than offset by the negative impact of their quest for our attention.

kolpa3• 8 years ago

There's a lot more to 'news diversity' than the basic "left-wing" vs "right-wing" opposing views on hot-button controversies of the moment. The topic selection is as important as the bias selection.

dleslie2• 8 years ago

What about the South Asian Times, The Hindu, South China Morning Post, Russia Today, AL Jazeera, et Al?

They cover world news, in English, and yet I rarely find them on Google News, and I suspect it's location-based filtering that's to blame.

Pigo• 8 years ago

I've had the same experience. For some reason Google thinks I want bi-daily reports on Trump's bathroom schedule, or what utensil he ate with. Which I can almost understand why I get that because so many people apparently want that, but that is literally ALL I get from them. And believe me, that is not figured out by skillful mining of my data.

Bartweiss3• 8 years ago

I only used Google News occasionally, but these days I treat it as anathema. At some point I heard about an event I wanted to look up, tried Google News in hopes of getting the most current sources, and couldn't find it.

Whatever decisions were being made, it was preferring old articles on barely-related technology topics to something high-profile on every major news site. I don't know if it was my profile or simply a crappy algorithm, but having a major event 'vanish' like that made me permanently swear off the site. I didn't get the experience of a bubble, but I certainly got the sense that the content was non-representative, and curated for goals other than keeping me informed.

fancyfacebook• 8 years ago

I think all of google search results are increasingly becoming more and more "filter bubbly" too, I have to anonymize completely or I know I'm just going to get bullshit results.

This announcement is hilarious, their products harm journalism bigly. It's like McDonald's putting a nice little leaf drawing about the environment on their cups.

SubiculumCode2• 8 years ago

I use google to look up rules from a game pretty frequently. I find that for some pretty vague search terms it is giving the results I want, from the particular game I want, at the top of the search results. Aside from the significant privacy concerns, this is useful...until I try to search for something else...then my results get screwed.

Chris_Jay• 8 years ago

I wonder whether you got downvoted for your choice of words. I'll try using bigly in a sentence when it can happen organically and see whether the same happens to me.

skrowl• 8 years ago

I had a similar problem. After I stopped using gmail & google search (for privacy reasons) and started using Duck Duck Go, it almost seemed random in what news it was trying to feed me because it didn't have enough data. I messed with the little sliders, banned fake news sources like HuffPost/WashPost etc, but I couldn't get it to deliver a news feed I actually wanted to consume... so... I just gave up on it.

Finally went back to a combination of InnoReader.com (RSS from sites I know I want) and News360.com (more subject based, varying sources). No need for Google News anymore, particularly after all the news of their censorship and bias has become more and more public.

specialist2• 8 years ago

I do much the same. But I'm still missing local events, news, politics. I haven't figured out how to efficiently get those feeds.

kbenson• 8 years ago

banned fake news sources like HuffPost/WashPost etc

Is the Washington Post considered fake news by most? Do you have examples of why you think it's fake? I'm curious because I actually pay for WaPo. I occasionally pull up fox news to see another side, but while I do consider WaPo liberal leaning, it seemed at least less biased than some other sources I've seen, and I would rather know the biases I'm consuming.

lern_too_spel2• 8 years ago

Are you confusing WaPo with The Washington Times?

SubiculumCode2• 8 years ago

I agree...and more and more the same articles are being presented to me for days on end, maybe because they are a "match" to my interests.

But in fact my interest is have an unbiased/multi-biased news feed so I can properly survey the news-scape. It is how I can get a sense of the world,upcoming trends.I can choose, and quickly, based on text, whether an article is of probable interest. I do not want a bubble, and I do not want an algorithm deciding what is interesting to me. It is inefficient and false.

And don't get me started on AMP

arrythur• 8 years ago

I disagree with your sentiment about Google News. I think it does a great job of aggregating all the sources to a given headline. It even goes as far as labeling the sources as "Opinion pieces", "Highly Cited", or even "From ___" opposing entity sources (eg. From Saudi Arabia sources).

There is no easy answer to to display ONLY unbiased sources, because that would require an unbiased source to pull from. Which I don't believe exists. With Google News, responsibility falls on the reader to use the sources in front of them to formulate an educated opinion and gain an understanding of the story. If a reader chooses to only view either right-wing or leftist sources via Google News, then that's beyond Google's control.

daturkel• 8 years ago

We seem to be expecting technology to allow us to cast media literacy to the wind, but that's not going to happen. I don't happen to be a google news user, but it strikes me as providing the opportunity for the user to either remain in an echo chamber (for any given story, you can read the article from your outlet of choice, for example), or to diversify what you consume. Technology is one tool that people use to spread disinformation, propaganda, and bias, but it's just a tool. Similarly, technology is one way to fight it, but it's just one way—I think we could all use a reminder on how to be a savvy consumer of news media. Most people don't seem to appreciate the difference between an outlet covering a story versus breaking it, or how sourcing and citing work, the difference between opinion articles, analysis and reportage, and so on.

ksk2• 8 years ago

Well, offloading responsibility gets you nowhere. It doesn't solve the problem, it simply ignores it. What value is there in aggregation if there is no standard of quality?

dleslie2• 8 years ago

Out of similar concern, could you share your blackhole list?

inetknght4• 8 years ago

Specifically for google news? It's a pretty short one-liner:

0.0.0.0 news.google.com

richjdsmith• 8 years ago

I know there are many people disagreeing with you, but I found the same as you. The news I was seeing was so hyper targeted that I was missing major events just because they were unrelated to the echo chamber that had been created around my past reads.

shawnee_• 8 years ago

The best thing about Google News (the old Google news) was that it was like being able to search microfiche of all the old-school news publications (but digitally): articles written by journalists for publications that happened to also be digitized. You could scroll back and back to as many results as the engine could find on any given topic. As a research tool, it was unparalleled in its ability to help journalists link facts to unbiased sources and to multiple sources.

When they redid the design (yes, I know exactly what you are talking about) it was like ... murdering democracy: limiting results.

I had to stop using it all together.

Sure you can go search google.com, but items that would show up on news ( == important things) are somehow lost from google, and it's just not the same.

Sad day when we lost the old news.google.com. If what they're saying here is true, the first thing to do is to bring back the old news search. That will help journalists more than anything.

chmars• 8 years ago

The article is NOT about Google News, it’s about the Google News _Initiative_.

inetknght4• 8 years ago

If Google didn't want the two connected in peoples' minds then Google should not have named the two so similar.

Indeed, I cannot fathom an initiative which would not tie directly into Google News, as yet another data point to profile you (the product).

colordrops• 8 years ago

I purposely blocked all news of a certain sort, and they still get pushed to the top of my feed. I'm convinced that Google is using News to push its agenda, as evidenced by both my experience and Eric Schmidt's comments [1]

1. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/pa39vv/eric-schmi...

ariwilson• 8 years ago

I disagree; I get a lot of stuff I disagree with on Google News.

loggedinmyphone2• 8 years ago

This perpetuates the misconception that there is a such thing as objective newsworthiness. If I only want to read stories about endangered species and polka musicians, that's no less valid than someone who wants to read about school shootings and the Olympics.

Ntrails• 8 years ago

The issue is that I don't want to only read about school shootings and Olympics - but because I spent 3 weeks following the latter closely and 2 days actively investigating the former now it dominates everything that I see and it isn't obvious that this is happening.

If I open a newspaper and skip through most of the pages to the celeb gossip one, at least it's a conscious choice. Out of sight out of mind and all that

mojuba• 8 years ago

Why is Google putting $300 million of their own money into this?

Does anyone have greater than zero trust in what Google is trying to do in this space?

jacksmith210068• 8 years ago

Can't think of anyone I would trust more. Can you? Who?

Google allowing video on YouTube they can't monetize kind of saids it all about Google and free speech.

wtetzner• 8 years ago

Google allowing video on YouTube they can't monetize kind of saids it all about Google and free speech.

Huh? You mean video that doesn't contain ads? If those videos attract users to YouTube, then those users are more likely to start watching some videos that do contain ads. Seems pretty straight forward, and says basically nothing about whether or not Google can be trusted.

wuliwong2• 8 years ago

I trust duckduckgo more. :)

lgleason• 8 years ago

Given the bias inside of Google and the fact they have already demonstrated that they are not a neutral arbitrator, the last thing I want to have is them being the arbitrator of who or what news is seen. This is more of an attempt to consolidate their power, what you can and cannot see etc.. Hard pass.

eclipxe• 8 years ago

There is no bias.

smaddox• 8 years ago

Those are not the articles you're looking for...

jacksmith210068• 8 years ago

Bias? Google is now paying the infrastructure cost for channels like Alex Jones as no advertisers to generate revenues for Google.

But in the name of free speech Google allows on YouTube and foots the bill. What could be more unbias?

simula672• 8 years ago

Google has fact checked a claim that was not made in right leaning Daily Caller website : http://dailycaller.com/2018/01/09/googles-new-fact-check-fea...

Although it may be bugs and not bias : https://www.poynter.org/news/blame-bugs-not-partisanship-goo...

Google continuing to host Alex Jones may not be be 'in the name of free speech', they may not want people to go to other platforms to get their content. They can lead users to other videos from any video ( using the side bar ) and make money from those videos which does contain advertisements

WalterGR2• 8 years ago

Given the bias inside of Google and the fact they have already demonstrated that they are not a neutral arbitrator

I hear this accusation a lot, but I haven't heard about (or perhaps I just forgot) specific examples.

Perhaps there's a comprehensive rundown of what's being alleged, somewhere on the web?

Alternately, can someone clue me in with examples?

markdog12• 8 years ago

Damore's class action lawsuit: https://www.dropbox.com/s/f6p02fijxrd7c6m/20180108%20Damore%...

Some tidbits: http://thefederalist.com/2018/01/10/19-insane-tidbits-james-...

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=google+sued+by+james+damore&t=ffab...

antirez• 8 years ago

Meanwhile Google Now Italian version is full of garbage that I signal for a long time, and nobody cares about removing it...

cryoshon• 8 years ago

anyone else notice how all of the examples they chose are distinctly NOT current events, contentious issues, or anything where there might be a serious dispute over what constitutes the basic facts of the situation?

i'm going to join other commenters here and say hard pass.

google has too much power already, and they aren't particularly responsible stewards of the public trust. and it seems like they haven't even solved any problems with their new product...

mudil3• 8 years ago

The real problem that Google doesn't want to talk about is its monopoly (with FB) of the digital ad market, to the tune of something like 85% of the total market. As a result, from big to small publishers, specialty publishers, regional publications, etc are all struggling. Here's a read: https://www.medgadget.com/2018/03/google-serfdom-publishing-...

IAmEveryone2• 8 years ago

How exactly can two competing companies share a monopoly?

mudil3• 8 years ago

Duopoly, to be precise

mkj• 8 years ago

I like Google News to browse, but their forced news-on-every-android-chrome-new-tab is the reason I've uninstalled Chrome and gone to Firefox. I was surprised, Android Firefox is actually a pretty competitive browser these days!

Hooray anti-competitive cross-subsidies.

(edit: I tend to block cookies on desktop so I guess they don't have too much profile to tailor news)

zoul2• 8 years ago

As someone who runs a regional newspaper, I very much doubt that the future of healthy journalism is in the hands of a big company such as Google. We are already thinking hard what to do with the Facebook monopoly, we would be crazy to voluntarily stick our neck into another one.

awakeasleep• 8 years ago

First, I'm the type of person that thinks the concentration of power from monopolies could be the most pressing issue facing the USA--

But can you explain how having another choice is dangerous? It seems like it'd be a gasp of air in the face of facebook's suffocating presence.

smacktoward• 8 years ago

The hens in the hen-house can be forgiven for not being excited that there are two wolves outside now instead of one.

zoul2• 8 years ago

It’s not much of a choice if we can’t easily change our minds later. It’s more like a long-term investment, and if we are to make a long-term investment, we’d rather invest in a direct relationship with our readers.

open-source-ux• 8 years ago

But can you explain how having another choice is dangerous?

Don't forget that Google also tracks online behaviour on an industrial scale. It doesn't matter if that information is only collated in aggregated form or "anonymised" (a meaningless term), we don't know how that information could be mined with AI or machine learning either now or in the future.

In fact, I suspect that even Google hasn't figure all the possible uses of the enormous quantity of user behaviour it has captured and continues to capture. And that ubiquitous data capture starts right from school, where millions of students use a cloud-based OS called ChromeOS that records everything they do.

The tech community's response to Google's online tracking and data capture is not scrutiny or questioning, but silence (or a rush to defend them).

ENGNR• 8 years ago

1. Seize distribution (facebook likes, subscribe with google)

2. Muddy the waters over who's user it is (FB instant articles / AMP, FB news feed / AMP carousel)

3. Start taking higher percentages of the ad revenue

4. Laugh when the publishers try to negotiate some back with no leverage

5. Do a big song and dance about how sad it is that publishing has lost all of it's revenue

6. Rinse and repeat (instagram / google news initiative)

yousifa• 8 years ago

Can you pls email me (in my profile)... have some questions that I’d like to ask privately

Slansitartop• 8 years ago

I very much doubt that the future of healthy journalism is in the hands of a big company such as Google.

Especially one that's shown a willingness to try to silence narratives that are against its corporate interests:

http://www.businessinsider.com/new-america-fires-antitrust-r...:

Barry Lynn, formerly the director of the antitrust-focused Open Markets program at New America, charged Wednesday that Google pressured the think tank to fire him and drop his program after he wrote a statement in June praising European regulators for fining the search giant $2.7 billion for abusing its market power. In that statement, Lynn said Google's "market power is one of the most most critical challenges for competition policymakers in the world today."
After Lynn published the statement, Eric Schmidt, chairman of Alphabet, Google's parent company, contacted New America, and "communicated his displeasure," Lynn told the New York Times on Wednesday.
"Google is very aggressive in throwing its money around Washington and Brussels, and then pulling the strings," Lynn told the Times. "People are so afraid of Google now."

pyoung• 8 years ago

Think tanks are basically lobbyist/pr firms in disguise. While I am not necessarily disagreeing with your main point, I don't think this particular incident is all that controversial. When companies hire lobbyists, they expect them to represent their interests. Same goes for think tanks.

sterban10• 8 years ago

I got fed up with Google News a year or so ago, over the echo chamber that the news site has become. It motivated me to create https://statesreport.com, with no ads and no tracking.

TaylorAlexander• 8 years ago

I’d never heard of your site but I just checked it out. I’ve got to say it looks really nice. I’ll bookmark it and try to use it. Thanks for making it!

sterban10• 8 years ago

Thank you for the nice feedback!

e15ctr0n5• 8 years ago

Great job with the news website! Where do you get the news from and what stack are you using on the website?

sterban10• 8 years ago

The server is written in Go. The news scraper is written in python. I don't have the full list of sites offhand, but I'll try and get back to this comment!

switch007• 8 years ago

BTW, the CSS for 'p' has 'sans-serif-light' but I don't have that (or the others) on Chrome/Debian, which results in my default (which happens to be Serif).

sterban10• 8 years ago

Thank you! I will make sure that gets included in future testing.

aylmao• 8 years ago

Nice site! Big fan. Out of curiosity, are you monetizing it in any way? Expect increased traffic after this HN post? How are you making sure we don't empty your pockets?

sterban10• 8 years ago

No, and no plans to. If costs become an issue, I will ask for donations to fund. It's heavily optimized, so I think it can handle the spike!

24gttghh• 8 years ago

Wow this works without whitelisting anything in noscript. Thank you!

sterban10• 8 years ago

Thanks, that was the goal!

scottybowl• 8 years ago

Are you open to creating an API for us to query for https://www.chooseholly.com? We currently pull data from Bings API for our Discover feature.

Happy to pay for usage :)

e15ctr0n5• 8 years ago

Just checked out your site - nice! Interesting to hear about your Discover feature. What does it do exactly?

sterban10• 8 years ago

Sure! You can reach out at sgterban@gmail.com

ChuckMcM• 8 years ago

Interesting, I just opened your site and it has nearly the exact same list of articles/headlines/sources that my Google News page has. I wonder what is different about my settings and the settings of those who feel their news feed is highly edited.

Generally for news I prefer Blendle, and no I don't mind paying per story although I think some papers are pretty extreme in what they think their journalism is worth.

nwsm• 8 years ago

This looks great, thank you. Consider a donation button.

sterban10• 8 years ago

I certainly will in the future. Thank you for the kind feedback!

koverda• 8 years ago

Not really related - but why does this page have a ton of these absolutely massive images? It's a 34.1MB monster of a page.

dicroce• 8 years ago

You know what would actually be welcome? Some way to tell real from fake news. Get to work on that, Google.

oneeyedpigeon• 8 years ago

They’re just working on solving the halting problem, then they’ll get right on it.

ibdf• 8 years ago

I bet you they are going to push AMP plus their Newstand App which sucks. The Newstand app is great for finding news., but not great for reading cause AMP butchers the content so often I ended up clicking on "view in browser" all the time. and dare you try to copy and paste text!

kingnight• 8 years ago

Sadly, Google is also sitting on a HUGE amount of archival newspaper in a completely unsearchable state.

They've OCR'd thousands of historical papers but the search is completely broken.

https://news.google.com/newspapers

It's a pretty incredible resource if you know the date/place of an event but if you wanted to research a little more broad it's a tool with incredibly untapped potential.

I wish they would spend more time providing tools for people to consume information in powerful ways rather than trying to 'tailor' experiences.

arghwhat• 8 years ago

What do you expect? They're just an advertisement agency. They don't have the tools or skills required to perform advanced searches in a large, unstructured data corpus.

Oh, wait.

danso3• 8 years ago

This wasn't the reason given when the 2011 announcement was made regarding the end of the project. But since then, the archive has faced copyright issues as newspapers sign contracts with other archive services: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160825/10114535344/newsp...

kolpa3• 8 years ago

What specifically is broken? Basic keyword search seems to work.

make3• 8 years ago

keyword search is the very bare minimum for search

soundwave106• 8 years ago

The original edition of the Google News Archive included a timeline that helped you narrow down the date range. See this help page from 2008: http://web.archive.org/web/20080905060327/http://news.google...

I find the omission in the current engine somewhat frustrating. If you are looking for original references, this timeline was very helpful -- a lot of times, the current search pulls up more modern references that aren't necessarily as useful if you want perspectives from the past. There are ways to search the current archive by date, but they are not terribly intuitive (https://www.thoughtco.com/search-tips-for-google-news-archiv...).

(My memory is that the previous search engine gave better results as well, but unfortunately it's difficult for me to prove whether that's correct one way or another.)

ucaetano3• 8 years ago

I wish they would spend more time providing tools for people to consume information in powerful ways rather than trying to 'tailor' experiences.

Power users are a very, very small number, probably sub-million, generate zero revenue, complain a lot and want features that cost a lot of money. There's no reason why Google would target them.

But I'm sure you can find a professional service that does that, allowing for powerful search of historical news. Probably costs a lot, though.

Fej• 8 years ago

Universities typically have subscriptions to service(s) that do just this.

TeMPOraL• 8 years ago

Empowering users to become more and more power users is literally the reason humanity bothers with science and technology. It was the reason shared by many people who started now successful software companies. It's sad to see profit motive distract people away from that core reason.

benbreen• 8 years ago

I agree. Similar situation with the Google Books interface, which as far as I can tell has changed little or at all since it was launched in 2005.

Admittedly, I'm a niche within a niche segment for them (professional historian) but if Google improved the functionality of their newspapers and books services, it would translate to increased research productivity for my entire field (and for anyone else who uses archival book and newspaper scans regularly, like investigative journalists). It's a relatively intangible change but one that isn't inconsiderable, especially in terms of generating goodwill among students and researchers.

The subscription services are a complete mess at the moment, analogous to the state of for-profit academic publishers in general. Google has a golden opportunity to establish itself as an alternative to the predatory publishers who generally run digitized newspaper and article archives.

Dangeranger• 8 years ago

Correct me if I am wrong, but isn’t the reason the Google Books interface is so limited due to a court decision? Essentially the book publishers threatened to sue Google into the ground due to the copyright infringement of making full scans publicly available without a licensing agreement.

svat• 8 years ago

There used to exist Google News Archive Search, and it really worked. I was able to search for the name of an obscure person who died in 1910, find obituaries of them and create a Wikipedia article about them, etc.

Then in 2011 it was shut down, and also the number of newspapers hasn't grown, it has actually become smaller.[1][2] It's claimed to be back in some form, but those who used to use it earlier aren't really satisfied.[3]

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/05/googl... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Google_News_Archi... [3]: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/news/Fw2caKy6...

joedevon• 8 years ago

I recently got a subscription to newspapers.com to get access to archival data. Surprised no one has mentioned them. It's not super cheap, but I think it's worth it for the amount of information available. TBH I don't use it much for some reason but when doing research it will let you access sources most people ignore, because it's not google or facebook.

daodedickinson• 8 years ago

The SPLC is part of YouTube’s “Trusted Flaggers” program, yet Google News supports Farrakhan's The Final Call, even though the SPLC lists Nation of Islam as a hate group.

I won't link the rant about the Jews controlling the FBI, but check out this "news" brought to me courtesy of Google:

"Did the Honorable Elijah Muhammad know of the mathematics in the writings of the scriptures before Doctor Khalifa, and others, did? Not only did he, but he demonstrated that he was brought into the understanding of far deeper mathematical truths, which produced, correlated and interlocked all aspects of reality—including all of the problems of humanity—by Almighty God Himself. He was taught the very root of all mathematics. This root is in the brain, or mind, of the human being. God taught and brought him into the very nature of the movement of the mind of Him, Who originally conceived of all of that which we call “universe” and Who produced the human mind. Allah taught him the root of mathematics—which ultimately resides in the core of the mind of God Himself."

https://news.google.com/news/search/section/q/%22There%20is%...

nugi• 8 years ago

Slpc still thinks Pepe is a hate symbol and juggalos are gangsters. You don't have to dig down into scripture interpretation to see they have bias issues. Remove refrences to islam, jews, and religion, and focus on why the group is unreliable if you want to engage with most people.

jfaucett• 8 years ago

All I want is a resource like "google" for all newspaper articles ever that we have stored anywhere.

Whenever I'm studying a topic, I'll often look up very old or contemporary newspaper writings to see how our perceptions and attitudes regarding the issue have changed over time.

I did this with the civil war and slavery at one point and recently with artificial intelligence. I would highly recommend it for comparing and contrasting your current perspective on a historical event or issue with that time's perspective of the same event or past times' perspectives on that same issue. Its really interesting too to see how the modern perspective is formed slowly over the years up to the current day.

Ivoirians• 8 years ago

Someone else pointed that this exists and, surprise, it's run by Google: https://news.google.com/newspapers

There are other newspaper archive services though.

olivermarks• 8 years ago

'journalism' and 'news' are obsolete concepts.

A journalist was an employee of a large entity who wrote articles and made videos that complied with the reality and perspective the company they work for wanted to promote. (There are still a few of these employees left working for what's left of these entities)

'News' was selective packaged information to influence and inform the broadest reach, with a goal of selling accompanying advertising messaging based on that reach.

mtreis86• 8 years ago

Newspapers existed long before advertising. The goal was to inform, and to have a public place of record accessible to all.

notriddle• 8 years ago

Yeah, because they were funded by the governments they ran under. "News" is a polite word for "propaganda," always was, always will be.

lambda_lover• 8 years ago

I hardly think that journalism and news are outdated and unnecessary. Where else would people get long-form updates on what's happening in the world? We can do better than corporate/government propaganda, but it's unclear exactly how to avoid biases generated by your funding. Funding news and paying journalists (even for unpopular and unprofitable articles) is the real problem we need to consider.

danso3• 8 years ago

And what have they been replaced by?

bootlooped• 8 years ago

Part of this is a method to make subscribing easier. I would prefer if there were a ubiquitous and easy way to make micro-payments for news articles. I consume news from way more sources than I am willing to subscribe to.

mitko• 8 years ago

Google and traditional media as well are in the business of selling advertisement. I feel that when your money comes from selling your readers attention to the highest ad bidder, one incentive becomes to sensationalize and do other tricks to increase viewership. This incentive can be at odds with the incentive to inform truthfully and completely, as some of the important information would invariably be boring, resulting in less sales. I've experienced this at Twitter as we optimized the product for engagement.

I hypothesize that this incentive to lock-in reader groups, has led to fragmentation of media and creating a lot of "info bubbles", or "interest based magazines". I think this is exacerbated by the dropping cost of information ( I have some thoughts on the process at http://dimitarsimeonov.com/2017/10/27/the-shifting-sweet-spo... )

I don't believe it is in Google's _strongest_ interest to provide truthful media, as Google doesn't make it's money from telling you truth.

I am optimist though.. and think in the future we'll have journalist's job be to aggregate a lot of that narrative and collect some micro-payments. And we'll have a lot fewer journalists, as there is less money in making these narratives.

Clanan• 8 years ago

A huge consequence of the prioritization of clicks is the loss of quality reporting. Those shuttered newspapers who went the way of the dinosaurs carried with them hundreds of years of journalistic experience. A lot of it didn't transfer to modern news sites. Now we're paying the price with young, inexperienced "journalists" pumping out junk articles with poor sourcing, missing or wrong facts, etc. I can't find it now but one of the better modern journalists (Glenn Greenwald or Bob Woodward maybe?) had a great piece on this. He lamented how mainstream media is failing to maintain their journalistic standards because they're too biased and they haven't been taught how to be good journalists.

I think Google should focus heavily on this, but their PR doesn't mention it much. Quality journalists first, then quality tools.

wuliwong2• 8 years ago

I think my issue with this is that google has all lots of special interests. I believe a true, functional solution most likely needs to come from a new company. A company that can build its reputation on surfacing "quality" news but without any particular bias or agenda. I'm not sure how any already large corporation would ever be able to win my confidence to act in this way.

BastardGas• 8 years ago

Why can't Google News be searched by date? It used to have that feature but they took it away. I wonder why!

ksk2• 8 years ago

Is there a page that actually explains what this is? The linked to page seems to be devoid of any actual content. Is Google going to be covering the crazy costs involved in sending journalists all over the world, keeping them safe, doing investigative journalism (very little of which is happening now anyway), etc. My cynicism aside, its nice to see a tech company atleast try to help find a way to fund journalism in the future.

peterwwillis• 8 years ago

"The future of journalism depends on all of us working together."

Actually the future of journalism depends on media companies to stop working like tabloids trying to attract eyeballs to shiny controversial crap.

Seriously, I've had to turn off every Breaking News alert and e-mail that I have because 9 times out of 10 it's something stupid or scandalous relating to Trump. Scandal or "shocking political developments" are not breaking news, especially when they happen every day. It's not world news, it's not national news, it's not local news. It's gossip about a reality TV star.

This isn't journalism, this is the slow eroding of my sanity during time which I should be getting to know what the weather will be like tomorrow, whether an important referendum is coming up, actually important world events that impact real people, or significant changes to a local, national or global economic center, not to mention important scientific advances, and of course, sports news.

Real breaking news would be "a 7.5 earthquake leveled Mexico City today", "ethnic minorities in east asia continue to be massacred by their government who is denying the charges", "new tax laws will provide cuts to the richest", "the federal government is cracking down on states' push back to their anti-immigration and drug laws", etc. These are important things that are happening today that might affect me, my loved ones, my livelihood, etc. I don't give a shit what the special counsel has recently said about a person tangentially related to a controversy surrounding a political figure.

How about Google start an initiative to relay important, substantive, fact-based information to people that need it? Was that too much to put in their mission statement? I mean, they're only one of the most powerful technology companies on the planet employing the smartest engineers on the planet. Maybe they could get Google X to take a look at it.

cromwellian• 8 years ago

Sigh, reading the headline, it wouldn't take a machine learning model to predict the sentiment of the responses.

HackerNews is pretty much turning into an echo chamber itself around news. Pretty much every announcement is greeted with intense negativity, less discussion of facts, or other solutions. And I'm not just talking about tech companies, even the release of a new language, framework, or tool is often accompanied by excessive negativity.

If you don't want news to make money via ads, and you don't like systems to encourage subscriptions, and you don't like paywalls, than pretty much you need public funding of news by the state like NPR/PBS/BBC to make news a non-profit.

So I propose the following: A national 3% tax on all internet connections: mobile phone bill, cable, etc. The revenue for this to be paid to PBS/NPR/VOA/other public news orgs.

pasbesoin• 8 years ago

Ok, I guess I'll try to read this.

However, this comment won't wait:

If you were "with" the news, you wouldn't have done things like kill Google Reader, a primary vehicle power users used to process the news.

Stop prescribing. Start listening.

evolve2k• 8 years ago

"The future of journalism depends on all of us working together."

Translation:

"Your future as a new organization depends on you working well with us here at Google and finding ways for us to quietly tax part of your prior earnings"

amoorthy• 8 years ago

While this is generally a positive step by Google it will fall short in revitalizing the news industry for a simple reason. In a world of near infinite content options, most people can no longer justify having any single news subscription.

A better solution is a fractional subscription model where subscriptions are tiered to one's reading needs. This is what my company http://CivikOwl.com is working on. Hope to make a positive contribution to this important issue facing society.

jacques_chester2• 8 years ago

I generally agree with the model; it's a model that's been independently struck on many times now. Most directly in the hunt are Google and Flattr.

I had the same idea some time ago, but silly me, got interested in solving the technical problems of tracking visits while preserving privacy. What I should have been doing is fretting about the business side of things.

At least I got a patent out of it.

roycifer• 8 years ago

the real news is they forgot to optimize the images on that site!

martin1975• 8 years ago

I don't have a problem with 'truth' per se, merely a problem with who gets to adjudicate what is true versus what is not, even if something is apparently non-true.

Rather than delete or abridge any legal content (as defined by a litany of 1st Amendment SCOTUS cases), at least in the USA, instead of deleting/modifying/filtering news content, we should do with news content what we've done with movies' rating labels for as long as we have - tag the content with a 'truth' label.

So Google News can develop a tagging system that labels news articles as "most likely" to "least likely" to be true, like a 1-10 rating. HuffPo can have its own truth ratings for the content they push. Breitbart or Infowars their own, etc.

I'll go for a system like this any day over Google or the SPLC or CNN or Snopes or whomever crowning themselves "truth" endorses, when in fact, they're mostly spinning the facts and telling a story from their own POV/context.

Jeff_Brown• 8 years ago

The solution I wish for is one in which the knowledge graph generating users' news feeds is opened to users. Rather than hoping that an aggregator platform will pick what they need to read, a user ought to be able to ask questions like, "Show me articles arguing _", or, "Show me articles that contradict this one," or, "Show me articles about [topic] which users have labeled clarifying (or any synonym of clarifying)."

Google News Initiative

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