[Sigia-l] Google Needs People

[Jan C. Wright]

I actually loved the comment about no humans being harmed. I find google a 
crack up -- if you look deep enough in their site, you can find their menus 
for the free lunches they serve up to their employees -- roasted shrimp 
bisque, yum yum, let's go work there now... 
http://www.google.com/jobs/food.html And their corporate statement is also 
interesting -- "you can be serious without a suit." 
http://www.google.com/corporate/today.html

But back to the algorithms of Google news, my question is, if it is a 
barometer, how can it be that the same days I was looking for Iraq news, 
pre-congressional vote, when it was covered everywhere else, it didn't show 
up there? It was in every paper....Yet not enough? But a story about Paul 
Newman's food enterprises did make it, as one of the top stories in 
entertainment. Does this mean, in category rankings, that for 
entertainment, Paul was being written about a whole lot more in ratio to 
other entertainment news than Iraq was being written about in the rest of 
US news? This is the part that intrigues me.

jan




>A lot of folks who are complaining about Google News seem to be upset that
>it doesn't do things that it probably was never designed to do, and no one
>from Google ever claimed it would do. It's not trying to replace your
>newspaper, or replace the work of reporters and editors. It's not trying to
>be your personal news service, selecting only the stories *you* want to
>read. It's not trying to be an arbiter of what is news. Rather, Google News
>is merely a barometer of what other people have decided is news.