Google's Bias for Bigness
Belief:
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Russell Blackford, Udo Schuklenk
Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace:
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Scott Thill
DrugReporter:
Lies About Marijuana Drive People to a Much More Harmful Drug -- Booze
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Environment:
Why We Need Bees and More People Becoming Organic Beekeepers
Makenna Goodman
Food:
Despite Censorship By Beef Magnate, Michael Pollan Spreads Message About the Real Price of Cheap Food
Health and Wellness:
New York May Stop Heartless Health Insurers from Dropping Coverage When It Stops Being Profitable
William Ehart
Immigration:
NYC Marathon Raises Question of Who Is American Enough?
James E. Johnson, Jr.
Media and Technology:
Focusing on Fort Hood Killer's Beliefs Is an Easy Out to Avoid the Deeper Reasons for the Massacre
Mark Ames
Movie Mix:
The Yes Men: Pranksters Out to Fix the World
Mark Engler
Politics:
What Michelle and Barack's Marriage Has in Common with 56 Million Other Ones
Annabelle Gurwitch
Reproductive Justice and Gender:
Fetus-Shaped Potatoes? Going Undercover Inside the Weird World of Right-Wing Abortion Foes
Ann Neumann
Rights and Liberties:
"My Kids Want to Hide Their Identity; They're Scared Someone Will Attack Us": U.S. Muslims Being Targeted
Jaisal Noor
Sex and Relationships:
Instant Sex: Has the Digital Age Destroyed Relationships or Made Them Better?
Vanessa Richmond
Take Action:
G-20 Meetings: Nothing Much Happened in the Suites, and There Was Too Much Punch in the Streets
Laura Flanders
Water:
Why Natural Gas Is Not a Clean Energy Panacea
Stan Cox
World:
With Unemployment at 40 Percent, Afghan Teens Enlist in Army, Police
Lal Aqa Sherin
So you need a news fix....
You grab some caffeine, jump online and head to Google News to search for the latest news about, say, New York City's planned Freedom Tower.
It crawls across some 4,600 publications, finds news stories and ranks them from top to bottom.
In this case, the morning of June 29, the page flickers and, bam, Google has found and ranked the stories you need: as its top Freedom Tower story it presents a piece by The Minnesota Star Tribune, followed in downward order by The Los Angeles Times, London Free Press, Xinhua news agency (the official service of the Chinese government).
London Free Press? Xinhua? Does this seem somehow off? Google execs seem to think so, but reports of their proposed fixes raise as many questions as they answer. The company is reportedly concerned about biased or incorrect news stories getting ranked above more quality news. As a fix, they have filed a patent for a new technology that ranks a story by the quality of its source. But for a company that commands a superpower level of control over global Web-surfing behavior, even small changes have a huge effect.
Google doesn't comment on its present or future ranking criteria, but its news stories seem to be ranked based on relevance to search words and timeliness, not the reputation of the news source. But for alternative online news services, from CNET to AlterNet, B2B trade publications, and thousands of small radio and television stations that rely on Google News-related traffic, the company's patent application offers reason to worry about just how shallow a pool of sources the site will draw from. It says the new ranking system will consider:
...[The] average length of an article produced by the news source, an amount of important coverage that the news source produces in a second time period, a breaking news score, an amount of network traffic to the news source, a human opinion of the news source, circulation statistics of the news source, a size of a staff associated with the news source, a number of bureaus associated with the news source, a number of original named entities in a group of articles associated with the news source, a breadth of coverage by the news source, a number of different countries from which network traffic to the news source originates, and a writing style used by the news source.Would this value-laden code pass judgment on the passive voice? Will it consider contract writers in staff size? Will the "breadth of coverage" criteria take into account that niche-market publications often drill into topics -- be it military procurement or schools funding regulations -- more thoroughly than further-reaching news sources like CNN? Or the fact that these publications often break stories that are then picked up by CNN and others?
Kelly Hearn is a former UPI staff writer who lives in Washington DC and Latin America. His work has appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, American Prospect and other publications.
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