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Google to add 'news feed' to website and app

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Google to add 'news feed' to website and app

#91

Post by indy »

rtpg wrote: post #21
aphextron wrote: post #11

The "newsfeed" pattern is one of the worst ideas humanity has ever had. Never has it been so easy to manipulate public opinion at will. 10 years ago there was a such thing as standards in journalism. Now anypoliticalblog.com's headline has been promoted to the equal status of an actual news organisation by means of the implicit legitimacy of appearing in a news feed. This insanity has reached a crescendo with the off…

Let's not forget that standard media diet includes Fox News and One America Network (which has ~15% the viewer count of Fox News). Old media isn't necessarily great at filtering out nonsense. 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…

Echoing some of the other replies to your comment, The Guardian has really gone down in its quality of journalism.

Re: Google to add 'news feed' to website and app

#92

Post by H4CK3RM4N »

killedbydeath wrote: post #56
to_bpr wrote: post #5

>The feed will include news stories from a variety of publishers, to avoid the so-called filter bubble effect, where people follow only content aligned with their pre-existing point of view. >"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 increasin…

2020 election will be Larry Page running against Mark Zuckerberg

Trump would probably be a better candidate than either of them, at least he’s actually run a business and would have four years of presidential experience.

Re: Google to add 'news feed' to website and app

#93

Post by xg15 »

BigJono wrote: post #84
aphextron wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. 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 an…

I'm not sure I follow. It sounds like you're blaming blogs and online media for the decline in credibility of newspapers. 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 t…

> 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.

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.

Re: Google to add 'news feed' to website and app

#94

Post by michaelmrose »

hyperdunc wrote: post #66
aphextron wrote: post #11

The "newsfeed" pattern is one of the worst ideas humanity has ever had. Never has it been so easy to manipulate public opinion at will. 10 years ago there was a such thing as standards in journalism. Now anypoliticalblog.com's headline has been promoted to the equal status of an actual news organisation by means of the implicit legitimacy of appearing in a news feed. This insanity has reached a crescendo with the off…

"Actual news organizations" don't exist in the sense we'd like. They're all agenda driven and constantly lie by omission. 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 though…

I honestly don't believe breitbart and the guardian are equally bad. There have always been varying degrees of bias and different degrees of standards.

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.

Re: Google to add 'news feed' to website and app

#96

Post by rawfan »

atupis wrote: post #49
SkyMarshal wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone already did it! https://duckduckgo.com/

Some weird reason duckduckgo usually gives worse search results than google.

I repeatedly tried "living in another search-engine" for a month at a time. I tried Bing, DDG and Yahoo. If I didn't search for something easy (like "population new york") the results were useless and superficial.

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.

Re: Google to add 'news feed' to website and app

#97

Post by WillPostForFood »

Cursuviam wrote: post #80
hyperdunc wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a reason most of the MSM attacks Trump's credibility on a daily basis? 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…

I agree; the right-wing press lacks high quality journalists. Journalists seem to happen to lean left a whole lot more.

If 90% of the press is left leaning, no surprise that 90% of journalists lean left, high and low quality alike.

Re: Google to add 'news feed' to website and app

#98

Post by elihu »

pesenti wrote: post #9

20 years ago, all the engines (AltaVista, Lycos) did exactly that. And then they all became "portal" like. And then a brand new engine with just a search box (so refreshing so clean) came along and swiped them over....

Time for a new search engine maybe?

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.

Re: Google to add 'news feed' to website and app

#99

Post by hyperdunc »

michaelmrose wrote: post #94
hyperdunc wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Actual news organizations" don't exist in the sense we'd like. They're all agenda driven and constantly lie by omission. 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 though…

I honestly don't believe breitbart and the guardian are equally bad. There have always been varying degrees of bias and different degrees of standards. 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.

You may be correct but surely you recognize that the left can just as easily be accused of the same bias you attribute to the right?

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.

Re: Google to add 'news feed' to website and app

#100

Post by fwn »

oblio wrote: post #59
to_bpr wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I share your outlook on the future of society with regards to its relationship of the mass with technology and privacy. If anything the last decade has shown us, it's that the average person will readily sacrifice freedom and privacy for security and convenience at the earliest opportunity and almost entirely without question or protest. With that being said, I've some feeling that the "consent" FB and Google have fr…

Revolutions have only been started by a lack of food or money. Or because a very unpopular ruler. 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.

If people are very badly in need they can not sacrifice the time to rebel. It's somewhat counterintuitively the perceived oppressive poverty combined with an increase in wealth that enables revolutionary activity.
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