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Google News Initiative

newsinitiative.withgoogle.com

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Re: Google News Initiative

#111

Post by peterwwillis »

"The future of journalism depends on all of us working together."

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.

Re: Google News Initiative

#112

Post by TeMPOraL »

ucaetano wrote: post #93
kingnight wrote: post #42

Sadly, Google is also sitting on a HUGE amount of archival newspaper in a completely unsearchable state. 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 mor…

> I wish they would spend more time providing tools for people to consume information in powerful ways rather than trying to 'tailor' experiences. 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…

Empowering users to become more and more power users is literally the reason humanity bothers with science and technology. It was the reason shared by many people who started now successful software companies. It's sad to see profit motive distract people away from that core reason.

Re: Google News Initiative

#113

Post by azinman2 »

Moto7451 wrote: post #33
Bartweiss wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there some feedback feature or something you use to get a helpful range of stories? 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 u…

You can weigh your news sources. I intentionally give a little more weight to sources I don’t always agree with but aren’t obviously biased. Things like fake news spreaders, conspiracy theorist, government propaganda machines, or fair topical sites that simply don’t interest me (mostly Celebrity News and Gossip) get black holed. You can find those sliders in your settings. Also they ask you periodically on the deskto…

Reuters is good for that. Because they resell to other newspapers they're more fact oriented and less opinion.

Re: Google News Initiative

#114

Post by benbreen »

kingnight wrote: post #42

Sadly, Google is also sitting on a HUGE amount of archival newspaper in a completely unsearchable state. 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 mor…

I agree. Similar situation with the Google Books interface, which as far as I can tell has changed little or at all since it was launched in 2005.

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.

Re: Google News Initiative

#115

Post by fooker »

make3 wrote: post #104
kolpa wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What specifically is broken? Basic keyword search seems to work.

keyword search is the very bare minimum for search

Any search at google is N mapreduce jobs away from a keyword search.

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.

Re: Google News Initiative

#116

Post by e15ctr0n »

sterban wrote: post #68
e15ctr0n wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great job with the news website! Where do you get the news from and what stack are you using on the website?

The server is written in Go. The news scraper is written in python. I don't have the full list of sites offhand, but I'll try and get back to this comment!

So your Python scraper has a list of websites whose home pages it scrapes?

Re: Google News Initiative

#117

Post by jvdizzle »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #112
ucaetano wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wish they would spend more time providing tools for people to consume information in powerful ways rather than trying to 'tailor' experiences. 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…

Empowering users to become more and more power users is literally the reason humanity bothers with science and technology. It was the reason shared by many people who started now successful software companies. It's sad to see profit motive distract people away from that core reason.

I don't agree-- I don't think most people want to be power users nor do I think science and technology is supposed to produce more power users. People want hard and complex things to be done easier for them.

Re: Google News Initiative

#118

Post by Dangeranger »

benbreen wrote: post #114
kingnight wrote: post #42

Sadly, Google is also sitting on a HUGE amount of archival newspaper in a completely unsearchable state. 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 mor…

I agree. Similar situation with the Google Books interface, which as far as I can tell has changed little or at all since it was launched in 2005. 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 archiva…

Correct me if I am wrong, but isn’t the reason the Google Books interface is so limited due to a court decision? Essentially the book publishers threatened to sue Google into the ground due to the copyright infringement of making full scans publicly available without a licensing agreement.

Re: Google News Initiative

#119

Post by [deleted] »

jvdizzle wrote: post #117
TeMPOraL wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Empowering users to become more and more power users is literally the reason humanity bothers with science and technology. It was the reason shared by many people who started now successful software companies. It's sad to see profit motive distract people away from that core reason.

I don't agree-- I don't think most people want to be power users nor do I think science and technology is supposed to produce more power users. People want hard and complex things to be done easier for them.

[deleted]

Re: Google News Initiative

#120

Post by kuschku »

danso wrote: post #24
kosei wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on the blog article, it seems like the main thing they're trying to solve is the payment system (use Google payment to easily subscribe). If that's true, it's a much different and less exciting offer than the OP's linked page which seemed like a much larger initiative.

The subscription system sounds like it's one part of this initiative. And if it is indeed the "main thing" then I think we should give Google some credit for being serious with this initiative. A payments system is a boring problem but it is the one most core to news organizations' current existential problems. It's not as sexy as using NLP to categorize news archives perhaps, but it's the most important to news orgs…

A payment system that’s only useful with a credit card is useless in many countries, though.

And Google has managed to fuck up every payment solution they’ve built yet.

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