Google to add 'news feed' to website and app
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
I love DuckDuckGo for their no-following and no-tracking you policy. I admire that and want to support them. But yet, I know that many, many of the queries are usually yield far better results on Google.
I'm just hoping that with time and enough people using DuckDuckGo, it will get a lot better.
Trade offs.
I think there’s a middle ground though - and Google is far far on one side of it.
Searching for something like "programatically create credit memo magento" yielded the user documentation on how to create a credit memo while Googles first result was the relevant API page with the second being forum posts explaining how to do what I wanted.
If you need specific results and don't get them, you go back to Google.
DDG is my default, and I'm quite happy with it.
Also: I like that they're experimenting, but come on. Replacing a settings menu with a list of very specific yes/no questions that are added to that list as you encounter them - that's just wrong. You don't even get a benefit of being able to scroll through a settings screen to discover what features are available...
An early RSS-based aggregator -- but you could (and can) choose your feeds, if you like.
Duckduckgo seems like the obvious alternative search engine these days, but how much of their own indexing do they do? It seems from some casual googling (no, the irony of that is not lost on me) that they mostly rely on Bing or Yahoo as the backend.
Some thoughts:
Search engines should be a lot easier to build in 2017 than they were two decades ago when Google started out. We don't have to store the index in DRAM to avoid hard drive seek times like they did; we can use SSDs.
Having a good quality ranking metric could offset shortcomings in the size of the index. PageRank is okay, but we could do better by punishing sites that link to low-quality content.
Speaking of PageRank, the PageRank patent expires in a couple years, I believe. So, constructing ranking algorithms that build on PageRank will soon be an option.
It's hard to compete with Google and Bing in terms of hardware resources, but probably the minimum investment to build a useful search engine is probably at lot lower than what we might think.
A lot of the basic software infrastructure is probably already written. I don't know what the state-of-the-art in web crawlers is, but in 2017 I doubt that one would have to write one from scratch.
Maybe there's a way to build a shared/federated distributed index.
Running the project as a non-profit might be the best way to maintain trust of users. Not having any ads at all (like Wikipedia) might be a good way to one-up Google's previous policy of no ads/news on the front page.
Also, don't google have loads more ranking algorithms than just pagerank?
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana
Google could brand such an offering as "Google reader" and "Google personalized homepage"...
(For those who don't remember: these both used to be a thing!)
</Bitterness>
They don't want it to be your choice.
It's a psychological hack, and the promoters of this technology know it.
Though I agree that the newsfeed tends to put these things next to the NYT or the Guardian, I feel like "page rank"-y stuff could help smooth this out. I've already seen improvements to my FB newsfeed for this kind of stuff over the yearse.
Can't speak on the topic of NYT, but at least in the case of the Guardian, it's clearly lowered its standards over the last several years to find a market.
(I still read it, but it's slowly becoming a left-wing Daily Mail cough Owen Jones cough, which is really disappointing).
Great story, but the journalism was lacking significantly.
I'd love to know what the go-to center-left news source is over here. So far I haven't found it...
edit to add: their core business isn't actually selling ads on news articles, which also helps quite a bit.
I was always under the impression that Bloomberg was the non-WWE version of CNBC (i.e. primarily markets news, without Cramer's hysterics).
Will have to check it out again if its got broader coverage than I realized. Thanks for the tip!
Was there? Because last I checked all that these so called 'reputable' sources of news seem to put out is biased garbage full of misleading data and often blatant lies.
I've seen better journalism from bloody buzzfeed than I have from some of the "proper" news networks in Australia...
The inculcation of this sentiment is precisely the effect I'm referring to. The waters have become so muddied with nonsense that no one can tell right from wrong anymore. And thus, actual news organizations with trained reporters and fact checkers and a tradition of at least being held to some kind of accountability lose all credibility. It's not a perfect system, but it's one which evolved to solve the exact problems we are facing here. There's a reason Trump attacks the media's credibility on a daily basis. Throwing your hands up and saying "it's all fake news" is precisely what the propagandists want.
The reasons are ratings and political ideology. They know that a lot of people hate Trump so they attack him. Any evidence of wrongdoing on Trump's part is merely a happy extra for the MSM.
If Obama did the same things that Trump does, do you think the MSM would behave the same way?
The MSM have cried wolf so many times that now half the country will not listen if they actually find something solid against Trump.
Whatever your position on Trump, it's hard to think of the MSM as being driven by actual journalism. And that's a real shame for the small number of journalists in the MSM who actually have integrity.
There are plenty of right-wing journalists who have similar quality to left wing. Publishers like The National Review have fine writers and it is hard to argue the a publication founded by William F. Buckley is some liberal organisation.
The "problem" is that all these organizations are critical of Trump too.
And who else?
I do think there is an issue in that these sort of commentators have much less visibility than before in American politics, so it's easy to form a negative opinion about right wing journalism. Partially as a result, I can name several commentators that have migrated from "Republican conservative" to a more "independent" oriented stance. Names like David Frum, Andrew Sullivan, Bruce Bartlett, David Brooks, and George Will come to mind. None of these names are 100% "liberal", neither are still today. They just don't fit well with right-wing media that has increasingly become populist.
It is probably my bias, but I can't think of a similar type of left-wing commentator that's made the same transition. On the other hand, I've noticed increased populism in more left-oriented media too...
This is a shame, because even when these type of commentators were at their most raucous, I always got the impression that both sides respected each other. (You saw the same thing at, say the Supreme Court, where Scalia and Ginsburg were friends.) A lot of media these days in contrast is extremely us vs. them and tribal oriented, with seemingly no respect for the other side at all.
1. He's the most powerful head of state on the planet. 2. He's demonstrably not fit for the job. 3. IT'S THEIR DAMN JOB.
I don't even like the man, yet I am compelled to defend him against what I see as a greater injustice.
Newspapers aren't credible anymore because they continuously make the conscious decision to run bullshit stories full of twisted truths in the pursuit of sales, as they have always done. The only reason they had any credibility before is because people blindly accepted what they said without the tools to verify it.
They've had the same amount of journalistic integrity as they've always had. I.E plenty until there's a buck to be made by forgoing it.
Sources for that claim please?
Of course there were always plenty of papers that operated like that (tabloids etc), but I doubt they were as influential in main political discussion as e.g. Fox News seems to be today.
Why do you assume that? Absolute garbage tabloids have been influencing elections and dominating mainstream political discourse in western countries for decades[1]. In the UK an entire political ideology was created to try and work around the influence of right wing mass media (spoiler: the answer was allowing media barons to dictate policy).
If anything tabloid influence is lower today than in the past. Compare the result of the 1992 UK general election with the 2017 one.
And the more respectable papers have generally had their own problems with reporting standards. The likes of the Guardian and the Telegraph should be on the lower end of what's considered journalism, not the upper one.
Honestly, the introduction of online news sources has probably helped in a lot of ways, because it meant people might at last be checking information from sources other than tabloids. There's at least a niche for good quality journalism online now rather than it being an 'occasional' fixture in some newspapers on a good day.
And I'd also add that the Greek press is also garbage. They don't turn a profit at all and are simply propaganda for their owner's point of view. Their owners usually being family-owned conglomerates. It's as if the Kochs started their own newspaper. I get the impression this is actually pretty common in many countries, particularly eastern European ones.
I find LeMondediplomatique (in all it's countries regions) to be a light in the darkness of propaganda. Check it out
Maybe the US just kind of lucked out there.
I can't think of one "reputable" US news outlet that hasn't knowingly spread misinformation or half-truths at least once over the past year.
The "good" sources are generally the least bad ones that happen to confirm your biases more than the rest.
I can't help laughing at your quaint idea that spreading misinformation "at least once over the past year" is a major offence. Dozens of major inaccuracies (with blatant political motivation) per day is the kind of standard we are talking about here.
Not to mention the abhorrent behaviour of journalists towards victims of crime etc in trying to get stories, which is a whole other side to the UK media which probably isn't appreciated from the outside.
But then there's also The Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Economist, the FT – all of which have bias and flaws in their own way, but are indisputably higher-quality.
The mistake is in assuming that there can ever really be a realistic, completely-free-from-influence publication. In reality, we have to rely on a diversity of publications, funding models and political viewpoints, and make informed decisions. This needs to be backed by strong FOI laws and a culture of press freedom, which sadly is something which the UK has not been doing well at recently.
Please point out which stories, specifically, are "blatant lies", or "biased garbage".
WSJ:
- Investors Brace for Clues on ECB’s Tapering Plans
- Fed Faces Inflation Riddle
- Top Court Revises Trump Travel Ban Scope
- Bank Earnings Highlight Diverging Paths Since Crisis
- How a Saudi Prince Unseated Heir Apparent
- Trump Urges GOP to Seek Agreement on Health Measure
- Sen. John McCain Diagnosed With Brain Cancer
- Trump Jr., Kushner, Manafort to Speak to Senate Panels
- Where Will Banks Go After Brexit? Frankfurt Takes Lead
- Tech Stocks Eclipse Record From Dot-Com Era
- Court Overturns Convictions of Two in Libor Scandal
NYT:
- Two Weeks on Ice in McMurdo Station, Antarctica
- McCain Has Brain Cancer; Tumor Was Found in Surgery
- Citing Recusal, Trump Says He Wouldn’t Have Hired Sessions
- Trump Loans From Deutsche Bank Face Regulatory Scrutin
- China Woos Myanmar as U.S. Focus in the Region Wane
- Getting High in Uruguay Is Now a Pharmacy Stop Away
- Somalis in Minneapolis Shocked by Police Shooting
- President Persists on Health Bill, Urging Senators to Revive It
- Opinion: Gustavo Dudamel: A Better Way for Venezuela
- Opinion: Charlie Gard and Our Moral Confusion
- Editorial: The Dark History of Defining ‘Family’
-How Fear of Falling Explains the Love of Trump
-Trump is his own worst enemy.
-If Dr. Trump were your surgeon.
But "Biased garbage" I think was part of the original statement.
If this doesn't speak to bias of a publication I'm not sure what will. Besides I'm not sure all of the general public understands the difference.
That's why many people are on sites like HN: we get often more values from the comments that the articles themself.
That kind of feedback and engagement is the only thing that can keep journalism standards high I think.
I haven't seen any of them make a solid play at community-oriented commentary - things like persistent identities, karma systems, etc. Baffles me when sites like HN and Reddit are visited as much for their comments as the source articles. So many of the comments on mainstream news sites are drive-by insults instead.
Breitbart is shamelessly pro-Trump. They will publish stories that others won't but also won't publish anything counter to their narrative.
The Guardian, which someone else mentioned, is massively left-leaning and is also very selective about what they cover. Their articles are often poorly thought out and extremely regressive.
Both sources are poison if taken in isolation, without the antidote of the other.
The MSM have earned the lack of trust they receive. Anyone who wants to end up receiving an approximation of overall truth will consume a variety of sources with different biases.
My dad explained this to me very crudely some years ago, (but as he's a Daily Mail reader I dismiss everything he says by default).
In this case though, it really does require you to read broadly to get out of your opinion bubble.
The BBC is a perfect case study of this. It's got a charter that is supposed to make it explicitly neutral, but of course that's unenforceable in reality (what's biased and not is going to be a matter of opinion), as evidenced by their approach anytime the question of the license fee comes up in public discourse.
There's probably money to be made by crawling a variety of news sources, throwing the output into an AI fanoogler, and using it to write a separate article that balances the views on the given topic as a separate news site.
Obviously I'll require majority equity. Fanoogler R&D isn't cheap you know.
I just googled it in case it already exists and has offensive overtones, and this turned up:
"To scam someone out of something they owe you but do not want to give you."
Deep, yo.
edit: But yeah, organizations of people with biases can't be perfectly neutral
The majority of people read the papers because they want to read something sensationalist from their point of view.
* Actually what everyone should do is read a spectrum of papers from left to right wing. This avoids the bias problem because it becomes immediately obvious and it forces you to think about what the real story might be.
The right spins this as everyone is equally biased in order to justify there readers picking their own alternative facts to justify whatever positions they hold however improbable.
The real problem is diverging narratives and very little constructive communication between. Both sides have very valid concerns that aren't understood by the other.
Also, don't you think that suggesting Breitbart is worse than the Guardian might point to your own bias?
The Guardian is designed to look less like a tabloid, which gives the appearance of it being more honest - but is it really a less biased source of news? It's very hard to judge such things.
I've been reading the Guardian for a long time and I've noticed it's been embracing some of the more unsavory elements of the left in recent years. Someone else might contend those elements are warranted.
The differences in news reporting today seems to come down to the values we prioritize and the narratives that push them.
Ideally, journalists would do that research for us and present the information as objectively as possible. And we would trust them. But doing that takes a lot of time and doesn't result in a lot of clicks.
What elements? If you mean deliberately antagonistic opinion pieces from transphobic feminists (TERFs) then yes you're right. But I'm guessing that's probably not what you were referring to. If you mean run of the mill socialists then I can't see any truth to your claim - there's a small handful now and it's mostly the same small handful they published 10 years ago (Monbiot, Jones, previously Milne, and a couple of others). The Guardian as an institution hates socialism, even if it occasionally allows a mild opinion piece from a socialist about how it might be nice to raise the top rate of tax by 1% to pay for hospitals.
Other than an increase in the amount of clickbait the Guardian is mostly the same as it was 10 or 20 years ago. The editorial position has actually shifted to the right slightly since Viner took over. But historically it's always been a liberal paper. It supported the SDP, has supported the Lib Dems at various times, supported Blair and supported Iraq.
Part of liberalism involves giving voice to any old opinion no matter how dangerous, crazy, offensive or wrong, at least as long as it comes from the elite class and doesn't do anything as gauche as question the property rights of the wealthy middle class readership (coincidentally this leads to great clickbait on a lot of social and religious issues). So that's why you see the Guardian doing things like publishing articles by Ergodan or other fairly repulsive people as well as hosting flamewars over atheism/islam/feminism/cultural appropriation etc. It's not being left wing that leads to any of that. If it was a left wing paper it would contain far fewer articles of that type because the left wing generally doesn't subscribe to a "free market of ideas" like liberals do.
It's very easy to whip out an accusation like "This would never be published" if you never say what "this" is.
For a massively left-leaning publication, you need to look to something like the Morning Star: https://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/
It's comforting to think that Breitbart and The Guardian are equally biased, and if you average them together, you get the truth.
But I'd challenge you to find headlines on The Guardian that match Breitbart stories like these:
"Pro-Nazi Roots of Planned Parenthood Revealed"
"The Solution to Online Harassment is Simple: Women Should Log Off"
"Huma Abedin Most Likely a Saudi Spy With Deep Inarguable Connections to Global Terrorist Entity"
"Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy"
From memory here are a couple of Guardian headlines:
"Your worst nightmare: a successful Donald Trump Presidency"
"Have we reached peak beard?"
And here's a couple they're serving up right now:
"'Soon you'll be able to afford a BBC man' / Emily Maitlis mocks pay gap at conference"
"'Bigger than yours' / Randy Newman writes song about Donald Trump's penis"
"Peter Dutton's new mega department will streamline dog whistling and fear whipping"
Not exactly indicative of unbiased, quality journalism. But never mind, because how much do cherry picked headlines really tell us?
For example, "Your worst nightmare: a successful Donald Trump Presidency" is an article critical of the left(!) The headline itself comes from the conservative British historian Niall Ferguson. The complete quote is:
“I think one of the things Guardian readers, and their counterparts on the American coasts, don’t want to think about is the possibility that despite his obvious ineptitude, Trump might actually be successful.
“I said last summer to a bunch of liberal friends: ‘Your worst nightmare is not a Trump presidency; it’s a successful Trump presidency.’ The successful Trump presidency scenario is one in which, despite it all, the economy does better thanks to deregulation and tax cuts, foreign policy delivers some big wins on North Korea, the Middle East.
“It doesn’t take an awful lot for a president to start looking good. If the expectations start really low, which they have done, it may be one win, and I definitely don’t rule out a kind of ‘success in spite of himself’ scenario. And then you begin to wonder if a left-of-Clinton Democrat in 2020 would be blown away. We’ll see. The fun thing about doing history is you really can’t tell at this point which way it will go. It could quite easily go Jimmy Carter and he could be a lame duck.”
I just don't see how you can compare this to the Breitbart "reporting".
It really isn't. It's a liberal paper not a left wing one. That's not a theoretical distinction; you just need to look at their coverage of the UK Labour party over the last 2 years to see that.
It does publish a range of people in the opinion pages, including conservatives and socialists, but the reporters and most importantly editors are nearly all liberals. That's what informs which articles get published and which anonymous "senior labour party insider" they quote in the headlines and front page news stories.
People need to develop their own critical thinking skills and not rely on e.g. a specific newspaper they believe to have standards to do their thinking for them. I mean do you personally have an issue with identifying inaccurate news stories? If not, why not? People that want to believe obviously made up news are going to find some way to get their fix of news like that whether Google or Facebook filter it out for them or not.
I'd also like to remind you, it's not just quality of coverage that matters, it's what you cover.
(a.) particular country (b.) around the world (c.) and maybe few topics of interest (or not)
with a clean and simple interface w/o those fancy "social features" and not based on "trending" and "highly voted" features and charges a fee?
"i dont need to know about a person i will never meet or a place i will never go."
Most of any media is junk
>"To provide information from diverse perspectives, news stories may have multiple viewpoints from a variety of sources... and, when available, you'll be able to fact check," the company said in a blog post.
I'm growing increasingly uncomfortable with how Google, Facebook etc. are now positioning themselves in terms of what news and sources they believe we should and should not consume.
If this piece is true and this update isn't confined to the Google app then I think it may be the final nail in the coffin of my relationship with Google products.
I agree with your sentiment and I too am uncomfortable with it, but we the individuals should take responsibility and ownership of our consumption. It sounds like you are preparing to do so, but I don't have high hopes for society at large.
I might extrapolate that at some point I would have pinned the blame entirely on Google, and then rattled about how they have a "social responsibility" and perhaps that's still true. But I am seeing that really, we took the spade to dig a flowerbed, and haven't wavered a bit as it's deepened into a grave.
With that being said, I've some feeling that the "consent" FB and Google have from its users to essentially bulk collect and analyze their data may largely stem from ignorance as to what is being collected and how it's being used i.e. the relationship between the content one produces in Gmail and the ads that same person receives.
That's a tightly coupled, straightforward relationship too. I've no doubt that the average person has zero idea what is involved when Google touts that it can now confidently track an ad being served/viewed online to an in-store, in-person purchase offline.
Then again, with the Snowden leaks and similar and the absolutely apathetic (at best) reaction from the public at large, maybe convenience merely trumps all and will forever more.
So either basic needs or some basic needs + emotions.
If people have a decent job, a house and a car they'll basically never rebel.
[0]: http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/dwayne-the-rock-johnson-...
That's the trouble with fact check. It gives the illusion of that you're seeing the entire picture when you could just be looking through a keyhole and not know it.
> Google is known for its sparse homepage, which, though mostly white space, has, according to analytics firm Alexa Internet, become the world's most-visited website.
Anyone know where the BBC found this confirmation?
I don't see any reason to believe it would affect the site.
It just seems anomalous that such a great change would be announced with so little fanfare (a single sentence in the article). I need to see confirmation before I believe it.
If they're actually adding it to Google.com that's newsworthy, but i think that's just the BBC misinterpreting something.
At least DuckDuckGo has got the search page concept right.
Google is, if nothing else, obsessed with metrics; unless they'd A/B/... tested this to death, there is zero chance they'll roll it out to their homepage.
I can't believe it, and it's not mentioned anywhere on their blog post.
To be fair, most people probably search from the chrome toolbar now, but even so, I imagine at most, we'll see a staged roll out to a cohort to test it.
Rarely do I see them searching using the url box. That's where web addresses go silly!
All companies that design to metrics instead of vision always ship the worst UI/UX crimes. This is the ideology we have to thank for things like the lightbox sign up forms that block or lock out content if you try to browse without an account on FB/Pintrest etc.
You're assuming the metric Google is designing for is still how fast a user gets what they want off site. What if the metric they're designing for is how long someone spends in the Google ecosystem?
I would have bought into the other Plus, your social network, but you fucked over your base product (search) during its launch, and then went all "real names" et al. on us.
There might be a more-permanent way to set it if you are logged-in, but I don't usually do that for Google for privacy reasons.
&tbs=li:1
-amazon price udpates on products I like -random forum comments -HN threads trending -and of course, news type news
either way I don't ;like a cluttered feed but I do have my eye on this
(Same goes for Google's new-ish "share location" feature of Maps. Want that? Then you'll have to share and record you location for all apps. And you have to hunt into settings to re-disable it EVERY SINGLE TIME. It's a feature! Basically a Trojan horse for Google's "record everything" business need, but less immediately threatening. A Trojan gnat, perhaps.)
To access a magazine subscription, you must open Play Newsstand, click on the Library icon now relocated to the bottom (as they've culled all options from the hamburger menu), then scroll down every single news feed source to which you are subscribed (I believe there are defaults as well), just to get to your most recent issues.
I spend about 10x more for magazines on Play Newsstand than I do on Play movie rentals & android apps every year. Yet the options for automating downloads, selecting the type/quality of download, verifying library content, etc are amateurish at best. You cannot even read a magazine using Google Chrome in Linux.
I also have almost a full year's worth of a subscription that doesn't even show up. When I called support, they stated it was a known issue. No refund and no attempt to fix. $70 down the drain.
But yeah, my news feed is so much more important than the household $500/yr on magazine subscriptions.
(disclaimer: I work at google, but I know nothing much about this in particular)
Fortune: > "In addition to putting Google Feed on mobile apps, the company is looking at attaching it to web browsers in some form, Shashi Thakur, a second Google vice president for engineering, said during the briefing." http://fortune.com/2017/07/19/google-feed-compete-facebook-n...
Indian Express: "The company is looking to bring it to mobile web browsers, although it didn’t say when. “It should have roughly the same behavior” as a news feed, Thakur said." http://indianexpress.com/article/technology/tech-news-techno...
Sad.
However, one could easily start using "startpage.com" or duckduckgo.com with "!google <your search string>" - both deliver results from google!
Scary shit.
Looks like Duckduckgo has an opening, don't waste it.
I used to think this was obnoxious. Then I started clicking on the articles. Now, I like this feature. It surfaces articles that I otherwise might have missed.
So I could see this working with Google, if they do it right. And perhaps they should offer a way to turn it off for users who prefer a simple UI.
But why?
Attention (which is Google's main product) is now captivated by the social networks. Google must adapt or lose market share. What is interesting is how they have not been able to really break into social. What about Google makes it so difficult for them to do just that?
I hate AMP and I'm pretty sure I'd hate this if I still used Google much. Especially if it's driven solely by algorithms and AI.