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."

So Google News is out of Beta?

[thewldisntenuff]

But what does that mean for Google? Wasn't the point of keeping it in beta to insulate it from lawsuits from a lot of the bigger newsgroups (Reuters, AP, et al)?

Implications.

[caffeination]

Can we use this figure of "more than 3 years" as any indication for the rest of their products?
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 only ask because I can't wait for Gmail to go "live" for real.

So When Are The Algorithims Going To Be Fixed?

[Anonymous Coward]

Google News has a severe and heavy bias towards certain types of media. The Google creators claims it is because their algorithims cause certain sources to show up near the top - but they have been caught "tweaking" results before.

Can Google News answer to the charges that they are purposely altering search results for News?

Nothing to celebrate

[SimianOverlord]

Google news is rather dubious. There's no real insight into how it selects headlines. 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. Google caved under pressure to China to screen thoughtcrime out of its results. I'm not sure I like Google anymore.

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.

Re:Subversion

[j-cloth]

I think that the way it works makes it less prone to bias than traditional news reading. Normal people go to cnn.com, or cbc.ca or bbc.co.uk or (god forbid) foxnews.com (see, I just inserted my bias. Wouldn't you like to be able to read a similar post from a right wing viewpoint to counterbalance mine right now?). Each of those sites has its own bias, and its own editors who may or may not be upfront about their agendas. The beauty of google news is that I can look at what each of these news sources has to say about the same story and get a better understanding of the actual story. For example it was very interesting to read the difference in opinion coming from Toronto and Miami when Canada passed same sex marriage legislation. Or today, I like to see at a glance what the Americans, Australians, and heck, even the French think about Last night's election [google.ca]

Re:So When Are The Algorithims Going To Be Fixed?

[Anonymous Coward]

Google News has a severe and heavy bias towards certain types of media.

That's a pretty vague statement. Would you mind specifying which types of media Google is biased towards, and providing some sort of evidence for your claims?

The Google creators claims it is because their algorithims cause certain sources to show up near the top - but they have been caught "tweaking" results before.

Again, that's rather vague. What sort of "tweaks" have been made, what exactly are these "certain sources", who caught them, and most importantly, where is your evidence?

Can Google News answer to the charges that they are purposely altering search results for News?

Can you even state a specific charge for them to answer? If this alleged bias is really so "severe and heavy", then it seems that merely browsing Google News would reveal it instantly. However, it doesn't. If you want answers, then I'm afraid you'll have to ask actual questions, instead of making vague, unsupported accusations of some mysterious bias that you can't even specify.

I am still looking for...

[Yvanhoe]

... a news site like slashdot. Not for the dupes, mind you. But for the ability to comment on the news, to hear different opinions from different parts of the world, with a mecanism like slashcode moderation (that works better than nothing, as flawed as it is) able to filter the noise. Would anyone be aware of such a website ?

Re:Google news --- News the way I like it

[urbanRealist]

They do not choose stories like that. I implemented an algorithm similar to what Google News uses for a data mining class in grad school. The algorithm is called Latent Semantic Indexing. The idea is to represent the ideas, or latent semantics, of a document in a vector space. Those documents with the smallest angle relative to a query vector are selected. Note that there is room for tweaking, but it's not just some guy deciding what I should read. It's software I can understand.