Blog of the week IV
This week's choice stretches the definition of "blog" to breaking point but, with 100,000 postings a day, I think it meets the basic criteria of regular updating. And another reason for including it is that it's the site that can help blogs get the kind of notice that will enable their authors to be taken seriously as journalists. We're talking about Google News.
Overwhelmed one day by the drudgery of searching for news in the Web's incessant flood of information, Google research scientist Krishna Bharat asked himself: Who has the time anymore to click from page to page while battling with banners and pop up ads just to read a particular story? And so the Bangalorean with a degree in computer science from IIT-Madras set to coding a way to gather and assemble in one place news from different sources.
At the core of his program is a clustering algorithm — a mathematical operation that finds similarities between things and then groups them. In practice, it looks at articles from different news sources and assesses factors such as a story's timeliness and ranking. What's unique about Bharat's program is that it scans the full text of the articles, rather than just headlines, allowing it to analyse and group stories according to the complete content. Working like a combination of librarian and editor the program searches matches and collects the articles. The result is that every story on the Google News homepage has a headline linked to its source, a blurb, the time it was last updated, headlines from other sources and links to sites with similar stories. The program crawls through 4,000 news sources in real time every fifteen minutes and posts 100,000 articles daily
Because stories are selected by a mathematical process Google says bias is avoided. The program pulls news from traditional and non-traditional sources and this means more exposure for blogs. With the 150 million unique visitors that hit Google daily that's a lot of attention. This opens up the possibility that the service could become a syndicate like Reuters or Associated Press for "minor league" journalists but there are difficult legal issues involved here. Would some sites cut off access if Google got into the news business? What's the situation if the site were to profit from someone else's content?
Is Google News the future of journalism? No, said Bharat in a recent interview, "But it will be part of the future of journalism," he added.
