I am terrible about taking the time to watch the news or read a newspaper, but i do make an effort to stay up to date through google news. I realized recently that I have no idea where Google gets their news from. I always simply trusted Google. Thus, today I began my quest to know the source of my news.
To begin, I went to the about Google News page to find how Google defined themselves as a news provider. This was very helpful. “Google News is a computer-generated news site that aggregates headlines from more than 4,500 English-language news sources worldwide, groups similar stories together and displays them according to each reader’s personalized interests.”
Now that I new Google News wasn’t simply reproducing news from CNN or FOX I wanted to know how they filtered there 4,500 sources and decide which news stories to display. As I dove deeper I found that Google’s News articles are selected and ranked by computers that evaluate, among other things, how often and on what sites a story appears online.
The same way Google gives out page rank and determines which sites are most relevant for organic search is driving what news we read. There is, however, a personalization element that changes things up. Users of Google News are offered links to several articles on every story, so one can first decide what subject are of interest and then select which publishers’ accounts of each story is preferred.
My concern is that although Google News apparently uses a democratic methodology of determining news, is that the media as a whole is not democratically controlled. News stories that make it into google by there ranking system of relevancy may be relevant by standards of controlled and biased news. The demographic that mostly uses the internet for their source of news is simply going to be spoon fed the majority opinion with little opposing view.
Google should look to better filter results by offering a the most relevant articles of not only the majority view that is most viewed, but also the opposing perspective. This to me means relevancy.
