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Also off topic. Google seems to favour "essays" over news, and most times you need to read the history of man kind before you get to relevant content in a news

Also off topic. Google seems to favour "essays" over news, and most times you need to read the history of man kind before you get to relevant content in a news piece. Also it has no means to detect clickbait which is seriously problematic.

onion2k 7y ago
Pagerank uses a bunch of things that would favor older pages - more inbound links, more clicks in the search results, and so on. They have "news search" if you just want news: https://news.google.com/ https://news.google.com/
- Yetanfou 7y ago
  The "Google News" search can not be seen as an objective search for "news" as it is biased both by the selection and weighting of sources by Google (staff and algorithms) as well as by the search history profile. If you still want to use Google News make sure to access it using a clean browser profile (not logged in, no Google-related cookies) to avoid the search profile contamination which otherwise colour the result. The source selection and weighting bias can not be avoided as that is part and parcel of the way the thing works.
  - londons_explore 7y ago
    I don't think anyone expects Google news to be unbiased? It collates hundreds of sources, many with obvious or subtle bias. If an aggregator puts bias in, they can't provide unbiased out...
    - Yetanfou 7y ago
      Why not? Google Search started out unbiased, Pagerank (the algorithm) did not care about any opinions or attitudes or leanings and the results ended up being representative of what was out there on the 'net. The same approach could have been used for Google News by pulling in any news source found by Google's crawlers which happened to report on any specific issue, weighing the rank of those sources the same way that regular search results used to be weighed (i.e. those sources which are linked to more often (after filtering out link farms) end up higher than fly-by-night operations which nobody links to. This is not what Google News does though, instead is seems to either use a whitelist or apply a blacklist to produce 'reputable news sources'. It is there the bias starts, in the selection of which sources to link to.
craz8 7y ago
Recipe sites have gone this way - I don’t need your life story for a gluten free chocolate chip cookie recipe that appears about 1500 words in

onion2k 7y ago

Pagerank uses a bunch of things that would favor older pages - more inbound links, more clicks in the search results, and so on. They have "news search" if you just want news: https://news.google.com/ https://news.google.com/

Yetanfou 7y ago
The "Google News" search can not be seen as an objective search for "news" as it is biased both by the selection and weighting of sources by Google (staff and algorithms) as well as by the search history profile. If you still want to use Google News make sure to access it using a clean browser profile (not logged in, no Google-related cookies) to avoid the search profile contamination which otherwise colour the result. The source selection and weighting bias can not be avoided as that is part and parcel of the way the thing works.
- londons_explore 7y ago
  I don't think anyone expects Google news to be unbiased? It collates hundreds of sources, many with obvious or subtle bias. If an aggregator puts bias in, they can't provide unbiased out...
  - Yetanfou 7y ago
    Why not? Google Search started out unbiased, Pagerank (the algorithm) did not care about any opinions or attitudes or leanings and the results ended up being representative of what was out there on the 'net. The same approach could have been used for Google News by pulling in any news source found by Google's crawlers which happened to report on any specific issue, weighing the rank of those sources the same way that regular search results used to be weighed (i.e. those sources which are linked to more often (after filtering out link farms) end up higher than fly-by-night operations which nobody links to. This is not what Google News does though, instead is seems to either use a whitelist or apply a blacklist to produce 'reputable news sources'. It is there the bias starts, in the selection of which sources to link to.

craz8 7y ago

Recipe sites have gone this way - I don’t need your life story for a gluten free chocolate chip cookie recipe that appears about 1500 words in