This isn’t the first time Google’s been criticized for its possible role in promoting content and it won’t be the last. Recently the company made reference to the fact it has considered ranking news according to what is most important—which sounds rather subjective if you ask us.
According to the New York Times, at a recent conference the question was posed of what type of content trumps less worthy pieces. Legendary broadcast journalist Ted Koppel said it “wouldn’t be a bad idea” if Google were to tweak its algorithm to promote topics people should be reading.
Addressing the topic, CEO Larry Page agreed the company wonders the same thing—whether Google should focus on delivering what’s more important rather than what’s most popular. “I see this as a responsibility to some extent, trying to improve media. If you ask anyone about how that information’s going to be propagated, what you’re going to focus on, I think it could work a lot better than it does now.”
“We as an Internet community, we have a responsibility to make those things work a lot better and get people focused on what are the real issues, what should you be thinking about. And I think we as a whole are not doing a good job of all that,” Page went on to say.
Google has been scrutinized and accused of cooking search results, so saying it has considered promoting what it considers important news content seems downright dangerous. It’s true that Internet media has become overwhelming and inundating with sources, and we’ll admit there can be difficulty in deducing which of those are your best choices. But Google is hardly the one to make this decision.
The company’s Panda update, an effort to cut down on content farms that pull content from the original source, has been controversial to say that least. And possibly ineffective: In many cases, scraper sites continue to rank above the sites they are actually taking the content from.
Then there’s the fact Google won’t tell us exactly what it takes into account when creating its algorithm. What effect does the +1 button have, Google’s Author page, or Twitter retweets? Google can’t explain how it ranks pages nor should it. Publications would exploit that information—they would be stupid not to. But that means Google becomes the very thing it’s defending itself against being: A gatekeeper.
There might be more information out there (there’s no might about it actually), but people are also becoming increasingly tech-savvy and many of us getting our news from the Internet know how to use filters and the like. We’re already at Google’s mercy enough as it is.
I disagree completely. Everyone accuses Google of “cooking” search results, but it has to: Google creates search results. If it isn’t the cook, then who is? Google’s entire job is to give somebody the best possible information at any one time. Not the most popular, not from the coolest sources. It needs to give us what we want to know and what is the “best” information. I think it can definitely do a better job, especially with Google News, which, by it’s design has to filter news based on importance and quality, especially on the News homepage, which suggests stories for users based on topics. Google has always “tweaked” the news and it will have to continue doing so. I, personally, would love to see it promote better stories from all areas of the net.
I don’t think Google’s Panda update did what it was supposed to, but that doesn’t mean the intent behind it wasn’t right. Google does need to reduce spam and copycat stories and promote the best material. How it figures out that big question is, and has always been, Google’s biggest job. There are plenty of other search engines to use if you don’t trust Google to do that.
I personally think it needs to weed links out of search results entirely in more cases. If you ask a question and Google can deduce the answer, it should present that answer and then more links in case that answer is not satisfactory. Bing is already trying to do this more often and Google is going to have to ramp it up to compete.
interesting Larry, some people don’t want to read about war and crime every day if you don’t mind!
just sorted but date/time published and we end users can decide how to sort them.
How about instead of asking how Google can aggregate others content better, we focus on how they shouldn’t be aggregating others content at all.
Google News in my opinion should not exist. What Google should do is provide users with a platform so that they can decide what content they want and by whom. Let’s not forget how upset Fox, NYTimes and other content producers got with Google for stealing their content and profiting from it.
Google IMO, should provide an unbiased experience. They need to work on their algorithm to get rid of scrapper sites, and low quality producing sources. That’s it.