What's Next For Google News

Stony Stevenson writes in with a Computerworld interview with a Google product manager talking about what's coming up for Google News, such as the possible addition of a video component and closer cooperation with YouTube. "One of Google's most popular and controversial services, Google News, is the aggregation and search site that media companies love to hate because it has become a major source of Web traffic and frustrations for many of them.... 'In an ideal world, Google News would show you who broke the story and the other articles that built on that. There are places where we're not doing that perfectly today.'"

Streaming Video

[jshriverWVU]

and their own team of reporters would be nifty. Google TV and maybe re-stream CSPAN, etc... I'd like to see that at least.

Good and Bad

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Finding the links and publishing who really got the scoop and who were the followers might seem like a good idea. But already there is such a great rush to publish, such a system will give more incentives to "publish first verify later" attitude.

May be Google could maintain the records of false reports, reports that were later corrected etc and come up with a "trustability" coefficient for the reporters and reporting organizations. This will probably give some incentives to verify the reports.

Re:Good and Bad

[packetmon]

One of the problems I could foresee with this will be an issue of credibility and a lot of mishmashed news. E.g. (US version) "Military personnel targeted and destroyed a terrorist training camp" ... (Arabic version) "US Military personnel bombed innocent children today..."

Who's going to determine which view of the news is correct and incorrect. Its different when you can read and infer as opposed to having someone verbally tell you their representation. PsyOps/Intelligence personnel from any country could/would have a field day with this video idea.

Google/News is the enemy of manipulation

[Anonymous Coward]

I pull plenty RSS feeds from Google/News to analyze how Media works.

You can draw charts which news channel or paper is owned by whom and make predictions how channel or paper XY will add or remove information from an article to push lobbying in one or the other direction (or sometimes both if the Ad revenue demands it).

It helped me to understand how we get manipulated. It made me ignorant for my own good.

You might believe that you find the truth between left and right? Even those days are over.

Lots of room for improvement

[Darth Cider]

Google News could use more depth. As it is, "top stories" run for many days and categorized in the broadest possible way, making deeper search into less popular stories very difficult. If not for the search feature and Google Alerts, the site would be indistinguishable from the Associated Press wire. Personalization just doesn't allow enough options. I would like to see more refined categories. For example, instead of the blunt "Nanotechnology" category, subheadings for solar energy news would draw lots of interest, to name just one possibility. Or create sister sites: "Google Geek News," "Google Punditry News," "Google Phun News." Sure, their RSS reader allows anyone to create a personalized aggregator, but again that places an obstacle in the way, all the work involved in generating lists. (Just emulate originalsignal.com!)

Eh, but the news is nothing really. The medium is the message. Google just wants to put ads in front of us. They have better resources than any company to help each of us find the news that will appeal to us and keep us coming back. YouTube is not the answer I was hoping for.

GeoRSS?

[Lord Satri]

TFA doesn't mentions GeoRSS. Sad since Google already supports GeoRSS [slashdot.org] and it would be more than appropriate for global news diffusion...