JD Lasica takes a look political coverage at Google News and Yahoo News in Balancing Act: How News Portals Serve Up Political Stories from the Online Journalism Review.
>From the article, “Google News uses computer algorithms to identify top stories while Yahoo News favors old-fashioned human editors. But do Google’s automated search results display a conservative bias?”
A good “behind the scenes” read.
On Tuesday, New Scientist reports that Google News China omits controversial material .
On Monday, PC World’s Harry McCracken recently posted about issues he’s found with Google News.
In August, Vin Crosbie released a report about Google News.
He wrote, “Although Google spiders more than 4,500 news sources, only about dozen account for the vast majority of stories on Google News. And two of those dozen predominant sources are owned and operated by the U.S. and Chinese governments.”
On a related note:
Another resource, Topix.net (not mentioned in the story) offers more than 150,000 topic oriented pages pages built by machine from a crawl of more than 7000 source. They also offer an explanation about how pages are built using their NewsRank technology.
I’m betting that Rick Skrenta (CEO of Topix) and Greg Linden (CEO of Findory) will have some comments about the OJR article.
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