10 Jan 2005 Michelle Malkin: Google News Blackout?

Posted at 23:43h in Blog by

Michelle Malkin is wondering if Google News has a biased algorithm, since the CBS story is all over the Internet, yet the CBS report does not appear on Google’s list of top U.S. news stories.

Here’s my guess, and it is only a guess: The Google News algorithim may have been written to overlook the names of major news publications in stories. Otherwise, terms such as “CBS,” Washington Post, etc. would end up with a high placement on Google news, because all the stories these institutions publish carry their name.

If I’m right, ordinarily, this is good. But it does not work very well when a publication name is also the subject of the story.

Just my two cents.

Addendum: UNCoRRELATED says: “Algorithms don’t conspire” — and explains.

Addendum 2 (1/11): There’s a “Watching Google Like A Hawk” website (it linked to this post and Michelle’s).

Who knew?



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