[Sigia-l] GoogleNews

[ryankowalczyk at mchsi.com]

ziya wrote:

> Perhaps the most telling aspect of the (fairly
> new/beta Google News for IAs is the the last two lines
> at the very bottom:
> 
> "This page was generated entirely by computer
> algorithms without human editors.
> No humans were harmed or even used in the creation of
> this page."
> 
> <http://news.google.com/>

I think this is a non-starter here. IAs rightfully 
*shouldn't* have anything to do with actually generating 
a specific instance of a page template.

Instead, IAs play a role in the design of the template 
itself by helping to decide things like, in this case:

-- the categories and labels for the main news sections 
should be world, US, business, etc.

-- 2 top stories should be featured on the news 
homepage, each with links to 2 other primary sources and 
4 featured secondary sources along with a link to view 
the full list of sources reporting the same story.

-- less prominently, 3 top stories from each news 
section should be displayed on the homepage.

-- etc.

And, like Victor, I'd love to see IAs get more involved 
in the creation of the algorithms or business rules that 
actually drive the population of the template by helping 
to decide the factors (and their relative weights) that 
affect, for example, how prominent a story is according 
to Google (e.g. is this story one of 2 featured top 
stories overall, one of 3 top stories in its section, 
etc.?).

Finally, I'm curious about how much (if any) human 
tweaking Google will end up doing *after* auto-
generation of the page instance since they are 
anticipating that their system will "occasionally result 
in some articles appearing to be out of context." Of 
course, after seeing enough problems that need manual 
fixing *after* the algorithm has run, eventually one 
should be able to improve the algorithm to eliminate 
these problems in the first place.

This reminds me of the human intervention some are doing 
in the display of search engine results (i.e. "best 
bets", etc.)

========================
Ryan Kowalczyk
IA in IowA
ryankowalczyk at mchsi.com