Ask HN: How would you improve Google News? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How would you improve Google News?

6 pointsdevmonk4 comments

I had been reading Google News for years, and now will still look at it periodically, but I've come to realize that even though it is good at what it does, which is just collecting and categorizing the latest news in an intuitive and somewhat visually appealing manner, it sucks as a way to get the news you want. This is because they collect every version of every news story and show the latest instead of the "best" article.

Case-in-point is the top current sci/tech story "Facebook Blames Outage On Database Failure" by InformationWeek, which has a really misleading headline. It was not a database failure the way you and I would think of it; it was a config tool problem. Now many users are going to think a database was at fault, when it wasn't. The method of bringing the crappy headline up to the top is just bad, bad, bad, and I don't think that ranking by popularity would help, because the non-techs or uninformed might thumbs up such a story.

So, how could they improve it and resolve this issue?

I think some of the reason Google News is the way it is has to do with balancing the line between providing free content and not paying copyright holders (Newspapers). Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

That being said, you're correct about quality being an issue. It seems that there are more algorithms, and less human component, deciding what reaches the front page. I think it would work better if it were like this:

1) Algorithm "bubbles up" the best news stories.

2) A trained human (or humans) filters through them, selects the best article.

3) Said article gets posted on the front page.

The trained person would have to have good journalistic taste. Pick out articles with proper headlines, rather than link-bait titles, or titles written by someone who has little clue what he/she is talking about (e.g. there aren't many journalists who are DBA's).

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A BIGGER problem is this: Showing only "news" and not "fluff".

Whenever there's a top-ten list, celebrity news, an op-ed piece, sports "news", reports on "marketing material" for new products/services, a puppy who fell down the well, "sharks" in the ocean (who pose no threat to you), the virgin mary appearing on a piece of toast, etc..., that's not real news. That's entertainment.

It would be nice if there was a news source that filtered all of that crap out. It might be as simple as gathering all news stories, and RegEx'ing out anything that also appears on Fark.com. ;)

The only news organization I'm aware of which does this well is PBS's News Hour. The problem is their presentation is very dry. On the plus side, they don't have "opinionated" reporters who add judgmental tones of voice and facial expressions to their presentation.

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Another random thought goes back to Op-Ed pieces. It would be nice if all online newspapers, or some sort of services, marked them as such, visually distinguishing them from news pieces. Perhaps make the webpage background light sky blue, rather than white. Anything, in a subtle visual manner, which states "This is someone's opinion; it may or may not be true".

For a long time, i've been wanting a news site that PURELY states facts about things that happened... with absolutely no author opinion or anything else cluttering it. Yes, a lot of people might find it boring, but I also think there's a large contingent of people out there who would appreciate the ability to just read through a list of hard facts about events happening around the world and being allowed to make their own opinions on it all. It also might be interesting to combine that with user comments, so that the story itself is pure fact, and the comment section lets people discuss/debate it independently of the article author's opinions skewing the base content.

Change of this happening though? Probably close to nil.

I wonder how tough something like that would be to build?

My first thought would be how to get that factualized content. Most journalists (popular ones anyway) like to inject their own thoughts and opinions into pieces. It takes an extremely committed person with a clear set of rules to avoid doing that.

Perhaps a way to do it would be to have news articles written by an individual, and then have a few others, or a community, edit it wiki-style, and essentially act like a collaberative editor. After it passes the editing phase, it appears on the website.

Finding, empowering, and rewarding the best writers and editors would be really important. Also defining what that clear set of rules should be will be hard too, but not impossible.

StackOverflow.com did a pretty good job with that. Things are kept on topic (with occassional jokes here and there), they empower those with a high level of karma (can edit, delete others' posts), and have a good set of simple rules to follow when submitting questions to the site:

Avoid asking questions that are subjective, argumentative, or require extended discussion - http://stackoverflow.com/faq

I don't think an individual who is lacking time would find a news source thats purely factual boring. Instead it would make their lives easier and more efficient.

Something like StackOverflow or HN is pretty much how I was thinking it would work, although with less emphasis on the voting. Voting would still be there, as a "quality score" of the article, but it would be time-based listings so it's still more like a news site.

There would need to be a way to earn the right to be an editor, either by contributing in minor ways until your 'karma' has built up, or some other way, to stop too much "fluff" making it to the site. Although I guess the voting down of articles would still prevent that.

Maybe a simple news-themed version of HN with "order by date & article score > 10" and throw in StackOverflow style editing.

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