[Sigia-l] GoogleNews

[Teresa Torres]

On Tue, Sep 24, 2002 at 09:51:23PM -0400, Michael Kay wrote:
>I think google news is mainly a novel idea, but a damn good one. It's 
>probably better as a wire service for journalists than for mainstream 
>consumption. News needs an editorial voice. No algorithm could 
>consistently pick the 3 most relevant stories to lead with. (Even 
>human editors have trouble figuring this out.)

I think this is precisely the brilliance of the google news idea. Picking lead stories is subjective. Real people have a hard time doing it. So why not take a census of what a collection of real people subjectively decided and treat them like votes. I think this is exactly where smart algorithms can help with problems that are difficult for us humans. Granted, this still relies upon real humans to poll - the thousands of editors who pick the lead stories on the 4,000 sites Google uses. 

Google, didn't remove the editor from the process, instead they came up with a way to collate a set of subjective choices in an attempt to find commanlity - perhaps remove some of the subjectivity. I think it's a fantastic experiment. 

Teresa