Google News Leaves Beta

Aqws writes "As of 1/23/2006 Google News is no longer in Beta. It was in Beta for three years and four months. Here's the blog of Google News creator, Krishna Bharat, on the subject."

Re:Does it still have a built in bias?

[DogDude]

Was the initial article right? You're asking if it "still" has a bias, but you're basing this on a Slashdot article, which often is about as accurate as a man standing on the street corner talking to Jesus with no pants on.

No, it wasnt

[brunes69]

Of course not, thats a bunch of hooey perpetrated by idiots on slashdot.

Think about it for a second, why in God's name would having the word 'beta' stuck in front of it be any kind of legal insulation? The population can still access it, the "damage" if any would still be done.

The truth is that there is nothing wrong with anything Google is doing, all they are doing is grabbing headlines and snippits. It falls under "fair use", and they direct the traffic to your news site anyway, so where's the problem? If you personally don't want your site involved all you have to do is opt-out. It is clear as day.

And this is breaking news?

[xoip]

Been using Google News since the beginning and thee have been few changes that I noticed... so what are the new features that come out of a full version release?

Subversion

[unixcorn]

I just read the blog. I have not used Google News and have no axe to grind. However, I can't help but worry about a service that "finds or picks" my news for me using algorithms. Isn't anyone worried that someone could be tweaking the search criteria to control what is displayed? When the news comes from many sources you learn to read into the articles what each organization's hidden adgenda is. By leaving the choices of what is presented up to a machine that is ultimately controlled by a few people rather than many editors across several outlets, we make ourselves vulnerable to suggestion or manipulation. I can see why they were worried about lawsuits....just a crazy rant.

Google news --- News the way I like it

[XMilkProject]

I agree with alot of the posters calling google news "dubious" and such. There does seem to be a lack of information as to how they determine what exactly is news worthy.

That being said, they seem to choose all the headlines that I'm interested in, and I find it quite pleasant to browse the stories there.

Perhaps the decision making process for what qualifies as a headline is: "What will google users find interesting" -- Which seems perfectly fine by me.

Re:Nothing to celebrate

[hackstraw]

I'm not sure I like Google anymore.

Well, hey, you get +1 insightful for saying you don't like google, and I get flamebate for saying I like google. Hmm.

I recently read Joel Bakan's The Corporation, which argues that due to their defining characteristic of only being beholden to profit and money, corporations are, in human terms, irredeemably psychotic. Google is an interesting case study, as it's set itself a higher moral standard, and has much further to fall. Google News was the beginning of that inevitable fall.

Yeah, I saw the film. The deal is that collections of people are the same as one person. Corporations, nations, states, sub-culture groups, etc all have "personalities", and collectively, they behave like an individual would behave.

The problem with many corps, is that they are selfish, self-centered, and greedy, just like the individuals that own and/or run them. There are exceptions. To this date, I believe Google is still an exception there. The concerns I have with them, is how much control will they be able to maintain now that the company is publicly traded and their stock is very overvalued.

The two cofounders of Google are worth between 7-11billion a piece, yet few even know their names, and they are still bluejean wearing casual guys, that do not own 20,000 square foot mansions or a boat that costs $300,000 to fill the gas tank (look it up).

At this time Google has a strong commitment to their users (read not customers, ie advertisers). This is something that people seem to miss. Sure Google takes cash from the advertisers, but that is not their focus. Their focus is to be the best, most accurate, and fastest searching thingy in the world.

I think Google will be alright for a while.

Re:Nothing to celebrate

[Funakoshi]

While The Corporation is an interesting read, its' argument is that if a corporation were a person, it would be psychotic. But they are not people. Moreover, a corporation (excluding non-profits, of course) exists for one reason: to increase shareholder wealth. While there are many people who have a problem with the tactics that are used in some instances to achieve such a goal, it does not change reality. Google is a corporation and they exist to increase their shareholders' wealth.

This seems to be something that Slashdot readers miss sometimes with regards to the major companies (Google, Microsoft, Intel, etc). Futhermore, the readers here love to hate them for their success. I have no idea whether or not Bill Gates can program worth a damn, but I do know he is a business genius, and by God people hate him for it.

Someone recently posted here that people who work for "the man" are this generations' version of "slaves" and that people should start their own businesses. I agree to some extent that entrepreneurs should be commended, but they had better hope they do not experience huge success, because then they will be another Bill Gates/Michael Dell/Sergey Brin/Larry Page; idolized one minute, detested the next.

/rant

Re:Nothing to celebrate

[rtaylor]

Google caved under pressure to China to screen thoughtcrime out of its results.
That's okay. The Chinese think a number of American, Canadian, European, etc. laws are pretty wacky too.

If Google wants to do business in $country then they generally need to follow that countries laws regardless of what people from outside $country think.

I imagine many Americans would be fairly upset if Google started to encourage 15 year olds to have a glass of wine or beer with dinner or a smoke after sex which is considered normal behaviour (if not encouraged behaviour) for people of that age in some countries.

Every place has wacky laws when you are not used to them.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Still crappy

[EVil Lawyer]

I used Google News for a while a number of years ago. I gave it up because it wasn't really doing a good job doing what it was supposed to: Presenting relevant news articles. About a week ago, I checked it out again. It still sucks. There were two articles on the front page that contained "news" at least two days old. Yes, the _articles_ were new, but the content in the article was days-old. I wonder if Google News took a little bit _too_ much influence from Slashdot.

That's a little disingenuous

[SimianOverlord]

The screened out results aren't some 'customs of the country' peculiar local ways. They are dissident sites that criticise and publicise China's human rights record. If there is one issue that transcends the borders of nation states it is people's favour of, and commitment to, human rights.

Re:Nothing to celebrate

[mblase]

Google news is rather dubious. There's no real insight into how it selects headlines.

Too be fair, though, there's no real insight as to how any other online news source selects its headlines, either. You're either leaving it up to the whims of the editor(s), or the whims of an automated database.

Re:Nothing to celebrate

[wsherman]

There are reports that it will happily take as 'news' press releases from the BNP in Britain, which is a little like giving news releases from the Ku Klux Klan the same prominance as the NYT.

Actually, that's something I like about Google news - you get to hear the other side of the story. Now, I already have a pretty good idea what the KKK believes (and I don't agree) so that's not particularly useful. On the other hand, Google News is very useful when it comes to understanding something like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict where there are wildly divergent viewpoints and where the US media is afraid to present anything other than consensus viewpoint in the US.

Re:Implications.

[DerekLyons]

This is a question for software developers - does a company like Google have a system that generally produces "1.0 quality" software after a certain amount of time, or does it depend entirely on the nature of a particular project?

I wonder about Google's mythical 'quality'. These are after all the people who released a map application without a scale, and an email application with the 'delete' button hidden and time-consuming to acess.

Google News has an even deeper and more subtle flaw - it fails to meet it's espoused goal of providing a broader perspective. All too often it's 'clusters' consist of news sources repeating, or rewriting, the same [AP|Rueters|Bloomberg|BBC|Whoever] press release. This gives the impression of legitimacy to the story - but reality they all trace back to same narrow selection of sources.

Yes, it is opt-out-able

[frankie]

Would it be fair use to photocopy headlines

Would it be fair if I chopped off your head for making a bad analogy? Signs point to yes.

If a company wants to have an internet presence it has to be searchable by Google

Guess what? The standard Google search (web pages) and Google News are two separate systems, with independent opt-out mechanisms [google.com]. So your site can remain searchable without participating in Google News.

If you are actually whining "I want my articles to get links in Google News, but I don't want them to use any specific words or phrases from my site" then you're being a psychotic dork.

Re:this hit digg 2 days ago

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah man. It was on digg about 5 times. Slashdot only covered it once and 2 days late at that.