Google News Initiative
newsinitiative.withgoogle.com
newsinitiative.withgoogle.com
It became a very bad source of news: all of the articles were self-reinforcing each other with very very little actual diversity of sources.
I like to read all sides so love this aspect of Google news. Heck I get negative Google stories from Google. Can't ask for more neutral.
My experience with Google News isn't so much bias or a bubble as uselessness. Source quality, comprehensiveness, and coverage depth seem totally irrelevant, like I'm just getting a feed of every news site a bunch of people clicked on recently. It's the same stuff as Facebook's trending bar, at about the same level of shallow and unfocused.
And occasionally, it seems like a major story is incompatible with my profile, or has a keyword collision with other topics, or something, and so disappears almost completely.
I tried Google News and Google Now with real eagerness, but my experience with both of them was just shockingly low quality.
You can find those sliders in your settings. Also they ask you periodically on the desktop homepage.
Pro tip: if you hate the mobile or new UI as much as I do, set your user agent to iPhone and go to google.com/nwshp. For whatever reason that magical incantation gives you the classic home page (with the sliders I mentioned in easy access/obvious places). I’ll be really excited if someone knows how to just set that globally in settings. I haven’t found it.
Neat site that does it for you: https://www.allsides.com/
I'm worried I'll share kolpa's problem, where sources I use for certain like CNN are also full of absolute dreck I don't want to see. But with a bit of luck I can put together a "news of the day" feed, and I'll just go to those touchier sources directly when I expect a specific piece to be usable.
I am naturally a super curious person.
I have zero problem with the UI on all devices. A big part is I am also use to it as I read news a lot.
1) Kid suspended from school for not walking out during the gun walkout.
2) kid spanked in Arkansas spanked for walking out.
About perfect. I am more center left but like to hear all aspects. Does drive my wife crazy when she walks in the room and I am watching Fox News. Do then turn off and put on MSNBC.
But the default is a mixture. Plus I use Google services a lot and for a long time as I try to keep all my data at Google instead of spread around. So everything from DNS, to TV as we have YouTube TV. We have Google Homes, etc.
Wish we could use Fi but I have a huge family so not financially practical. That would keep my location data away from my wireless provider.
I just wrote more about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16632589
I demand the filter bubble that we were promised.
We live in an attention economy. My most valuable resource is my time.
The inclusion of trog media is precisely why I won't use Google News. I couldn't figure out how to exclude it.
What little benefit Google News, Twitter, Facebook provide is more than offset by the negative impact of their quest for our attention.
They cover world news, in English, and yet I rarely find them on Google News, and I suspect it's location-based filtering that's to blame.
Whatever decisions were being made, it was preferring old articles on barely-related technology topics to something high-profile on every major news site. I don't know if it was my profile or simply a crappy algorithm, but having a major event 'vanish' like that made me permanently swear off the site. I didn't get the experience of a bubble, but I certainly got the sense that the content was non-representative, and curated for goals other than keeping me informed.
This announcement is hilarious, their products harm journalism bigly. It's like McDonald's putting a nice little leaf drawing about the environment on their cups.
Finally went back to a combination of InnoReader.com (RSS from sites I know I want) and News360.com (more subject based, varying sources). No need for Google News anymore, particularly after all the news of their censorship and bias has become more and more public.
Is the Washington Post considered fake news by most? Do you have examples of why you think it's fake? I'm curious because I actually pay for WaPo. I occasionally pull up fox news to see another side, but while I do consider WaPo liberal leaning, it seemed at least less biased than some other sources I've seen, and I would rather know the biases I'm consuming.
But in fact my interest is have an unbiased/multi-biased news feed so I can properly survey the news-scape. It is how I can get a sense of the world,upcoming trends.I can choose, and quickly, based on text, whether an article is of probable interest. I do not want a bubble, and I do not want an algorithm deciding what is interesting to me. It is inefficient and false.
And don't get me started on AMP
There is no easy answer to to display ONLY unbiased sources, because that would require an unbiased source to pull from. Which I don't believe exists. With Google News, responsibility falls on the reader to use the sources in front of them to formulate an educated opinion and gain an understanding of the story. If a reader chooses to only view either right-wing or leftist sources via Google News, then that's beyond Google's control.
0.0.0.0 news.google.com
When they redid the design (yes, I know exactly what you are talking about) it was like ... murdering democracy: limiting results.
I had to stop using it all together.
Sure you can go search google.com, but items that would show up on news ( == important things) are somehow lost from google, and it's just not the same.
Sad day when we lost the old news.google.com. If what they're saying here is true, the first thing to do is to bring back the old news search. That will help journalists more than anything.
Indeed, I cannot fathom an initiative which would not tie directly into Google News, as yet another data point to profile you (the product).
1. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/pa39vv/eric-schmi...
If I open a newspaper and skip through most of the pages to the celeb gossip one, at least it's a conscious choice. Out of sight out of mind and all that
At first I was afraid of missing out on "general interest" news until I realized: there isn't any such thing. General uncategorized news is just a collection of topics chosen by someone else. You don't need it.
But can you explain how having another choice is dangerous? It seems like it'd be a gasp of air in the face of facebook's suffocating presence.
Don't forget that Google also tracks online behaviour on an industrial scale. It doesn't matter if that information is only collated in aggregated form or "anonymised" (a meaningless term), we don't know how that information could be mined with AI or machine learning either now or in the future.
In fact, I suspect that even Google hasn't figure all the possible uses of the enormous quantity of user behaviour it has captured and continues to capture. And that ubiquitous data capture starts right from school, where millions of students use a cloud-based OS called ChromeOS that records everything they do.
The tech community's response to Google's online tracking and data capture is not scrutiny or questioning, but silence (or a rush to defend them).
2. Muddy the waters over who's user it is (FB instant articles / AMP, FB news feed / AMP carousel)
3. Start taking higher percentages of the ad revenue
4. Laugh when the publishers try to negotiate some back with no leverage
5. Do a big song and dance about how sad it is that publishing has lost all of it's revenue
6. Rinse and repeat (instagram / google news initiative)
Especially one that's shown a willingness to try to silence narratives that are against its corporate interests:
http://www.businessinsider.com/new-america-fires-antitrust-r...:
> Barry Lynn, formerly the director of the antitrust-focused Open Markets program at New America, charged Wednesday that Google pressured the think tank to fire him and drop his program after he wrote a statement in June praising European regulators for fining the search giant $2.7 billion for abusing its market power. In that statement, Lynn said Google's "market power is one of the most most critical challenges for competition policymakers in the world today."
> After Lynn published the statement, Eric Schmidt, chairman of Alphabet, Google's parent company, contacted New America, and "communicated his displeasure," Lynn told the New York Times on Wednesday.
> "Google is very aggressive in throwing its money around Washington and Brussels, and then pulling the strings," Lynn told the Times. "People are so afraid of Google now."
Blog posts announcing Google News Initative: https://www.blog.google/topics/google-news-initiative/announ...
Subscription payments feature: https://www.blog.google/topics/google-news-initiative/introd...
Elevating quality journalism: https://www.blog.google/topics/google-news-initiative/elevat...
Some news coverage on it: https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/20/17142788/google-news-init...
And Google has managed to fuck up every payment solution they’ve built yet.
Google probably accepts the most forms of payment of any single company in the world (just a guess), but which forms of payment are accepted on any given product under Google will vary. For example, Adwords[0] has the list of supported forms of payment by country. While in Play we things like Paypal, direct_carrier_billing, and gift cards.
I have no clue what the News Initiative is supporting, but I could guess it will be credit/debit cards from around the world.
Google has built a LOT of payments projects. Some have definitely failed, but there are many that you don't notice because it will be supporting specific flows in specific countries or products.
I had to get a CC just for the Google Play Developer fee.
CCs are very uncommon in Germany, everything – including Amazon.de – supports SEPA payments.
But Google does not.
So, the "Google probably accepts the most forms of payment of any single company in the world (just a guess)" statement may be technically true, but it doesn’t help at all.
They've OCR'd thousands of historical papers but the search is completely broken.
https://news.google.com/newspapers
It's a pretty incredible resource if you know the date/place of an event but if you wanted to research a little more broad it's a tool with incredibly untapped potential.
I wish they would spend more time providing tools for people to consume information in powerful ways rather than trying to 'tailor' experiences.
Oh, wait.
In theory, having a really nice search engine for this news would be rather easy for Google (/any Googler with a few weeks of time and access to this data).
This is essentially what every new employee at Google has to do in the orientation week.
I find the omission in the current engine somewhat frustrating. If you are looking for original references, this timeline was very helpful -- a lot of times, the current search pulls up more modern references that aren't necessarily as useful if you want perspectives from the past. There are ways to search the current archive by date, but they are not terribly intuitive (https://www.thoughtco.com/search-tips-for-google-news-archiv...).
(My memory is that the previous search engine gave better results as well, but unfortunately it's difficult for me to prove whether that's correct one way or another.)
Power users are a very, very small number, probably sub-million, generate zero revenue, complain a lot and want features that cost a lot of money. There's no reason why Google would target them.
But I'm sure you can find a professional service that does that, allowing for powerful search of historical news. Probably costs a lot, though.
Quite the opposite. Technology allows users to become less and less power users.
> It's sad to see profit motive distract people away from that core reason.
Not sure I got that part, are you complaining that other people are not leaving their jobs and living aside to build the product you want for free with no pay?
That seems pedantic. Technology allows users to become "less and less power users" by giving them the tools to solve problems they were not advanced enough to solve before, or that were too time-consuming or difficult to solve before.
That's exactly the same point the OP is making -- Google has the potential to build a tool which would allow people who otherwise cannot make use of these archives to do so.
Exactly, today a regular user can do what a power user could do years ago.
Create a full website with good design, structure, functionality? You had to be a power user, but not anymore.
Drive a car? You had to know how to use a clutch, shift gears, etc. Not anymore.
Access the internet? You had to buy a modem, configure it, connect, etc. Not anymore.
And so on.
Technology removes burdens, and allows regular users to do what only power users could before.
People don't want to be power users. People don't even want to be users. People want to listen to music, move, read.
Admittedly, I'm a niche within a niche segment for them (professional historian) but if Google improved the functionality of their newspapers and books services, it would translate to increased research productivity for my entire field (and for anyone else who uses archival book and newspaper scans regularly, like investigative journalists). It's a relatively intangible change but one that isn't inconsiderable, especially in terms of generating goodwill among students and researchers.
The subscription services are a complete mess at the moment, analogous to the state of for-profit academic publishers in general. Google has a golden opportunity to establish itself as an alternative to the predatory publishers who generally run digitized newspaper and article archives.
Then in 2011 it was shut down, and also the number of newspapers hasn't grown, it has actually become smaller.[1][2] It's claimed to be back in some form, but those who used to use it earlier aren't really satisfied.[3]
[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/05/googl... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Google_News_Archi... [3]: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/news/Fw2caKy6...
Happy to pay for usage :)
Generally for news I prefer Blendle, and no I don't mind paying per story although I think some papers are pretty extreme in what they think their journalism is worth.
But in the name of free speech Google allows on YouTube and foots the bill. What could be more unbias?
Although it may be bugs and not bias : https://www.poynter.org/news/blame-bugs-not-partisanship-goo...
Google continuing to host Alex Jones may not be be 'in the name of free speech', they may not want people to go to other platforms to get their content. They can lead users to other videos from any video ( using the side bar ) and make money from those videos which does contain advertisements
Google does not have to play the cost for more left leaning content like they have to do with alt right content.
Current dominance != future dominance. Read the concept behind innovators dilemma
Also youtube has stiff competition from Facebook : https://www.google.co.in/amp/s/mashable.com/2017/12/05/how-f...
The problem for a competitor is YT was built during a period of time it was possible, barely, to do this. I say barely as in Google had a ton of engineering challenges.
Not sure if technical but serving over 1.6 billion hours of video a day is really hard.
But now with all the content in one place it is impossible to compete.
Wife and me talking about Marsha getting hit with a football. Just turn around and ask the Google Home to play it and it plays a video of the scene. Same with Mary laughing at clowns funeral.
I hear this accusation a lot, but I haven't heard about (or perhaps I just forgot) specific examples.
Perhaps there's a comprehensive rundown of what's being alleged, somewhere on the web?
Alternately, can someone clue me in with examples?
I hypothesize that this incentive to lock-in reader groups, has led to fragmentation of media and creating a lot of "info bubbles", or "interest based magazines". I think this is exacerbated by the dropping cost of information ( I have some thoughts on the process at http://dimitarsimeonov.com/2017/10/27/the-shifting-sweet-spo... )
I don't believe it is in Google's _strongest_ interest to provide truthful media, as Google doesn't make it's money from telling you truth.
I am optimist though.. and think in the future we'll have journalist's job be to aggregate a lot of that narrative and collect some micro-payments. And we'll have a lot fewer journalists, as there is less money in making these narratives.
I think Google should focus heavily on this, but their PR doesn't mention it much. Quality journalists first, then quality tools.
A journalist was an employee of a large entity who wrote articles and made videos that complied with the reality and perspective the company they work for wanted to promote. (There are still a few of these employees left working for what's left of these entities)
'News' was selective packaged information to influence and inform the broadest reach, with a goal of selling accompanying advertising messaging based on that reach.
Whenever I'm studying a topic, I'll often look up very old or contemporary newspaper writings to see how our perceptions and attitudes regarding the issue have changed over time.
I did this with the civil war and slavery at one point and recently with artificial intelligence. I would highly recommend it for comparing and contrasting your current perspective on a historical event or issue with that time's perspective of the same event or past times' perspectives on that same issue. Its really interesting too to see how the modern perspective is formed slowly over the years up to the current day.
There are other newspaper archive services though.
Translation:
"Your future as a new organization depends on you working well with us here at Google and finding ways for us to quietly tax part of your prior earnings"
Does anyone have greater than zero trust in what Google is trying to do in this space?
Google allowing video on YouTube they can't monetize kind of saids it all about Google and free speech.
Huh? You mean video that doesn't contain ads? If those videos attract users to YouTube, then those users are more likely to start watching some videos that do contain ads. Seems pretty straight forward, and says basically nothing about whether or not Google can be trusted.
Actually the future of journalism depends on media companies to stop working like tabloids trying to attract eyeballs to shiny controversial crap.
Seriously, I've had to turn off every Breaking News alert and e-mail that I have because 9 times out of 10 it's something stupid or scandalous relating to Trump. Scandal or "shocking political developments" are not breaking news, especially when they happen every day. It's not world news, it's not national news, it's not local news. It's gossip about a reality TV star.
This isn't journalism, this is the slow eroding of my sanity during time which I should be getting to know what the weather will be like tomorrow, whether an important referendum is coming up, actually important world events that impact real people, or significant changes to a local, national or global economic center, not to mention important scientific advances, and of course, sports news.
Real breaking news would be "a 7.5 earthquake leveled Mexico City today", "ethnic minorities in east asia continue to be massacred by their government who is denying the charges", "new tax laws will provide cuts to the richest", "the federal government is cracking down on states' push back to their anti-immigration and drug laws", etc. These are important things that are happening today that might affect me, my loved ones, my livelihood, etc. I don't give a shit what the special counsel has recently said about a person tangentially related to a controversy surrounding a political figure.
How about Google start an initiative to relay important, substantive, fact-based information to people that need it? Was that too much to put in their mission statement? I mean, they're only one of the most powerful technology companies on the planet employing the smartest engineers on the planet. Maybe they could get Google X to take a look at it.
Rather than delete or abridge any legal content (as defined by a litany of 1st Amendment SCOTUS cases), at least in the USA, instead of deleting/modifying/filtering news content, we should do with news content what we've done with movies' rating labels for as long as we have - tag the content with a 'truth' label.
So Google News can develop a tagging system that labels news articles as "most likely" to "least likely" to be true, like a 1-10 rating. HuffPo can have its own truth ratings for the content they push. Breitbart or Infowars their own, etc.
I'll go for a system like this any day over Google or the SPLC or CNN or Snopes or whomever crowning themselves "truth" endorses, when in fact, they're mostly spinning the facts and telling a story from their own POV/context.
Hooray anti-competitive cross-subsidies.
(edit: I tend to block cookies on desktop so I guess they don't have too much profile to tailor news)
A better solution is a fractional subscription model where subscriptions are tiered to one's reading needs. This is what my company http://CivikOwl.com is working on. Hope to make a positive contribution to this important issue facing society.
I had the same idea some time ago, but silly me, got interested in solving the technical problems of tracking visits while preserving privacy. What I should have been doing is fretting about the business side of things.
At least I got a patent out of it.
However, this comment won't wait:
If you were "with" the news, you wouldn't have done things like kill Google Reader, a primary vehicle power users used to process the news.
Stop prescribing. Start listening.
HackerNews is pretty much turning into an echo chamber itself around news. Pretty much every announcement is greeted with intense negativity, less discussion of facts, or other solutions. And I'm not just talking about tech companies, even the release of a new language, framework, or tool is often accompanied by excessive negativity.
If you don't want news to make money via ads, and you don't like systems to encourage subscriptions, and you don't like paywalls, than pretty much you need public funding of news by the state like NPR/PBS/BBC to make news a non-profit.
So I propose the following: A national 3% tax on all internet connections: mobile phone bill, cable, etc. The revenue for this to be paid to PBS/NPR/VOA/other public news orgs.
i'm going to join other commenters here and say hard pass.
google has too much power already, and they aren't particularly responsible stewards of the public trust. and it seems like they haven't even solved any problems with their new product...
I won't link the rant about the Jews controlling the FBI, but check out this "news" brought to me courtesy of Google:
"Did the Honorable Elijah Muhammad know of the mathematics in the writings of the scriptures before Doctor Khalifa, and others, did? Not only did he, but he demonstrated that he was brought into the understanding of far deeper mathematical truths, which produced, correlated and interlocked all aspects of reality—including all of the problems of humanity—by Almighty God Himself. He was taught the very root of all mathematics. This root is in the brain, or mind, of the human being. God taught and brought him into the very nature of the movement of the mind of Him, Who originally conceived of all of that which we call “universe” and Who produced the human mind. Allah taught him the root of mathematics—which ultimately resides in the core of the mind of God Himself."
https://news.google.com/news/search/section/q/%22There%20is%...