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October 11, 2004
Google News internals
Google News internals: J.D. Lasica starts writing about how he thinks Google's robots are intentionally mean to a politician he likes, but then about halfway through he includes some actual data from Krishna Bharat of Google about how the ever-beta news aggregator works: "The ranking and prominence of stories are based on several factors: How many publications are writing about a topic; how recent the articles are; the size of the story, with substantive pieces ranking higher than short items; and the frequency of the search term within the article... Every 15 minutes a new edition of Google News is generated and the ranking changes. The formula rearranges the headline blurbs in each story cluster based on the freshness of each article and the importance of the source... Google News does not use the same formula as Google's general search engine, which ranks results based on how many people are linking to a site or article." The latter half goes into how different types of sites may use different phrasings of a search term (!), and then compares the Google News approach with the more "we choose the headlines" approach of Yahoo News. (For what it's worth, I use Google News these days mostly to check for technical news, or to compare how mainstream media portrays stories like "afghan election" compared to the blogosphere... for actual US political news & views, memeorandum seems to provide more useful coverage than does Google's listing of syndicated articles reprinted by various local newspapers.)
Posted by John Dowdell at October 11, 2004 4:59 PM