So on my personalized Google home page (which recently replaced My Yahoo!), a “top news” story was shown: Same-sex marriage: The heated Assembly debate.
As I’m very interested in politics, I was curious and clicked on it. What I found was in fact now what I would classify as news. Instead, it was an opinion article. For me this was the first time Google News delivered me to an opinion article rather than what would typically be classified as concrete news. Granted, all news stories are subject to bias, but there is a clear line that can be drawn between opinion articles and normal news stories.
And that is the problem. Google News can’t tell the difference. Sure, they could ask their 4,500+ affiliates to classify the articles — and maybe they already do. But when the the author of that article is the Director of Legislative Affairs for California Family Alliance I can’t imagine they would follow the rules very closely anyway.
So to me it seems that Google News suffers from similar problems that Google Search does: it can be gamed and manipulated for political agenda. I have nothing wrong with opinion pages, but they should be in Google Opinion, not Google News.
What do you think?
on Oct 7th, 2005 at 8:14 pm
I have seen several opinion articles on Google, especially wrt. stem cell related news.
> it can be gamed and manipulated for political agenda
I think it is impossible to filter out completely opinion pieces from actual news. The best you can do is filter sources.