Perhaps the BBC spoke to someone at Google who said the news feed would be available via the web – à la https://news.google.com or https://newsstand.google.com/ – which the reporter misunderstood to mean Google.com itself would display the news feed?
It just seems anomalous that such a great change would be announced with so little fanfare (a single sentence in the article). I need to see confirmation before I believe it.
as does the android app - has for a long time. The only announcement here seems to be that they're putting some marketing behind it and calling it a capital-P Product, instead of just being a feature of the app.
If they're actually adding it to Google.com that's newsworthy, but i think that's just the BBC misinterpreting something.
Really, Google, all I want is my search-oriented "plus" operator back, and for you to unfuck search.
I would have bought into the other Plus, your social network, but you fucked over your base product (search) during its launch, and then went all "real names" et al. on us.
From the search-results page, there's a "Tools" button which exposes a bar containing "Any Time, All Results". Click "All Results" and it exposes "Verbatim" as another choice.
There might be a more-permanent way to set it if you are logged-in, but I don't usually do that for Google for privacy reasons.
>The feed will include news stories from a variety of publishers, to avoid the so-called filter bubble effect, where people follow only content aligned with their pre-existing point of view.
>"To provide information from diverse perspectives, news stories may have multiple viewpoints from a variety of sources... and, when available, you'll be able to fact check," the company said in a blog post.
I'm growing increasingly uncomfortable with how Google, Facebook etc. are now positioning themselves in terms of what news and sources they believe we should and should not consume.
If this piece is true and this update isn't confined to the Google app then I think it may be the final nail in the coffin of my relationship with Google products.
They wouldn't be in the position to guide content if it weren't for users submitting that choice to them.
I agree with your sentiment and I too am uncomfortable with it, but we the individuals should take responsibility and ownership of our consumption. It sounds like you are preparing to do so, but I don't have high hopes for society at large.
I might extrapolate that at some point I would have pinned the blame entirely on Google, and then rattled about how they have a "social responsibility" and perhaps that's still true. But I am seeing that really, we took the spade to dig a flowerbed, and haven't wavered a bit as it's deepened into a grave.
I share your outlook on the future of society with regards to its relationship of the mass with technology and privacy. If anything the last decade has shown us, it's that the average person will readily sacrifice freedom and privacy for security and convenience at the earliest opportunity and almost entirely without question or protest.
With that being said, I've some feeling that the "consent" FB and Google have from its users to essentially bulk collect and analyze their data may largely stem from ignorance as to what is being collected and how it's being used i.e. the relationship between the content one produces in Gmail and the ads that same person receives.
That's a tightly coupled, straightforward relationship too. I've no doubt that the average person has zero idea what is involved when Google touts that it can now confidently track an ad being served/viewed online to an in-store, in-person purchase offline.
Then again, with the Snowden leaks and similar and the absolutely apathetic (at best) reaction from the public at large, maybe convenience merely trumps all and will forever more.
If people are very badly in need they can not sacrifice the time to rebel. It's somewhat counterintuitively the perceived oppressive poverty combined with an increase in wealth that enables revolutionary activity.
Trump would probably be a better candidate than either of them, at least he’s actually run a business and would have four years of presidential experience.
The problem with the Trump era is that part of the political establishment is so divorced from reality that expressions of support are indistinguishable from sarcasm.
Agree to it or not, all B2C companies want to maximize the time you spend with them and therefore, will push everyone for consumption rather than creation.
The biases tend to show up in the details that are left out rather than any details that are falsified. That's what tends to make it so hard for the general public, because if you don't know what's being left out before you read the story you only get the perspective being framed.
That's the trouble with fact check. It gives the illusion of that you're seeing the entire picture when you could just be looking through a keyhole and not know it.
20 years ago, all the engines (AltaVista, Lycos) did exactly that. And then they all became "portal" like. And then a brand new engine with just a search box (so refreshing so clean) came along and swiped them over....
The reason is Google probably has 100x the money, and 1000x the expertise.
I love DuckDuckGo for their no-following and no-tracking you policy. I admire that and want to support them. But yet, I know that many, many of the queries are usually yield far better results on Google.
I'm just hoping that with time and enough people using DuckDuckGo, it will get a lot better.
I repeatedly tried "living in another search-engine" for a month at a time. I tried Bing, DDG and Yahoo. If I didn't search for something easy (like "population new york") the results were useless and superficial.
Searching for something like "programatically create credit memo magento" yielded the user documentation on how to create a credit memo while Googles first result was the relevant API page with the second being forum posts explaining how to do what I wanted.
If you need specific results and don't get them, you go back to Google.
I use DDG, but honestly still go to google a lot. The secret is DDG allows "bangs" -- !g in front of a query is a google search. It turns the Chrome omnibox into an even more powerful tool.
The difference is personalization. I never would visit a portal site like yahoo, but every morning I look through my Google Now feed. Relevance matters.
You could actually customize excite.com a great deal. You could choose your stocks, your weather with a zipcode. You could make a box with your favorite links, you could drag around the various boxes and news feeds, add RSS links. The whole deal. It wasn't personalized content created automatically based on your search history though.
Yeah, I actually hated when that went away. I had several RSS feeds on there, my inbox, my calendar... never found a good replacement. I used Netvives for a while, but it was somehow not the same (can't really put my finger on it, though).
Except Google Now still completely sucks because you have close to zero direct control on what gets shown there.
Also: I like that they're experimenting, but come on. Replacing a settings menu with a list of very specific yes/no questions that are added to that list as you encounter them - that's just wrong. You don't even get a benefit of being able to scroll through a settings screen to discover what features are available...
It was my homepage for the longest time. Such a great service. Sadly now I have to come to HN and hope there's something of interest here when I have 15 minutes to spare.
After it went away I spent a lot of personal time building something similar on a unix box running at home. Still miss some of the features I could never replicate though.
Duckduckgo seems like the obvious alternative search engine these days, but how much of their own indexing do they do? It seems from some casual googling (no, the irony of that is not lost on me) that they mostly rely on Bing or Yahoo as the backend.
Some thoughts:
Search engines should be a lot easier to build in 2017 than they were two decades ago when Google started out. We don't have to store the index in DRAM to avoid hard drive seek times like they did; we can use SSDs.
Having a good quality ranking metric could offset shortcomings in the size of the index. PageRank is okay, but we could do better by punishing sites that link to low-quality content.
Speaking of PageRank, the PageRank patent expires in a couple years, I believe. So, constructing ranking algorithms that build on PageRank will soon be an option.
It's hard to compete with Google and Bing in terms of hardware resources, but probably the minimum investment to build a useful search engine is probably at lot lower than what we might think.
A lot of the basic software infrastructure is probably already written. I don't know what the state-of-the-art in web crawlers is, but in 2017 I doubt that one would have to write one from scratch.
Maybe there's a way to build a shared/federated distributed index.
Running the project as a non-profit might be the best way to maintain trust of users. Not having any ads at all (like Wikipedia) might be a good way to one-up Google's previous policy of no ads/news on the front page.
Yeah I'm pretty sure that DuckDuckGo is powered by Yahoo/Bing which really just means, Microsoft is powering DuckDuckGo's search engine for the most part. I'm sure DDG puts their own spin on things as well, but Microsoft is doing all the heavy lifting.
Taking market share from Google based on search alone would require something even more revolutionary than what google brought to the table x-years ago.
Also, don't google have loads more ranking algorithms than just pagerank?
Ironically Google used make a big deal about how their homepage was clean and uncluttered, unlike Yahoo (they especially called out Yahoo's horoscopes).
The "newsfeed" pattern is one of the worst ideas humanity has ever had. Never has it been so easy to manipulate public opinion at will. 10 years ago there was a such thing as standards in journalism. Now anypoliticalblog.com's headline has been promoted to the equal status of an actual news organisation by means of the implicit legitimacy of appearing in a news feed. This insanity has reached a crescendo with the official endorsement of sites like breitbart.com by the White House, and I don't think there's any going back.
It's a psychological hack, and the promoters of this technology know it.
Let's not forget that standard media diet includes Fox News and One America Network (which has ~15% the viewer count of Fox News). Old media isn't necessarily great at filtering out nonsense.
Though I agree that the newsfeed tends to put these things next to the NYT or the Guardian, I feel like "page rank"-y stuff could help smooth this out. I've already seen improvements to my FB newsfeed for this kind of stuff over the yearse.
As a longtime Guardian reader, I'd be careful about implicitly declaring the Guardian as any more "legitimate" than anyone else.
Can't speak on the topic of NYT, but at least in the case of the Guardian, it's clearly lowered its standards over the last several years to find a market.
(I still read it, but it's slowly becoming a left-wing Daily Mail cough Owen Jones cough, which is really disappointing).
> 10 years ago there was a such thing as standards in journalism
Was there? Because last I checked all that these so called 'reputable' sources of news seem to put out is biased garbage full of misleading data and often blatant lies.
I've seen better journalism from bloody buzzfeed than I have from some of the "proper" news networks in Australia...
>Was there? Because last I checked all that these so called 'reputable' sources of news seem to put out is biased garbage full of misleading data and often blatant lies.
The inculcation of this sentiment is precisely the effect I'm referring to. The waters have become so muddied with nonsense that no one can tell right from wrong anymore. And thus, actual news organizations with trained reporters and fact checkers and a tradition of at least being held to some kind of accountability lose all credibility. It's not a perfect system, but it's one which evolved to solve the exact problems we are facing here. There's a reason Trump attacks the media's credibility on a daily basis. Throwing your hands up and saying "it's all fake news" is precisely what the propagandists want.
Is there a reason most of the MSM attacks Trump's credibility on a daily basis?
The reasons are ratings and political ideology. They know that a lot of people hate Trump so they attack him. Any evidence of wrongdoing on Trump's part is merely a happy extra for the MSM.
If Obama did the same things that Trump does, do you think the MSM would behave the same way?
The MSM have cried wolf so many times that now half the country will not listen if they actually find something solid against Trump.
Whatever your position on Trump, it's hard to think of the MSM as being driven by actual journalism. And that's a real shame for the small number of journalists in the MSM who actually have integrity.
Um, no, that's not the reason. The people that choose to become journalists often do it for idealistic reasons. They want to enlighten the public about issues they care about. Palestine, for example. Right-wing people generally don't have that many issues they want to tell people about. Everybody already knows how high their taxes are, no journalism needed.
Let me assure you right wing people have as many issues they want to tell people about as left wing people. You might not like them or consider them idealistic, but they do. To be blunt, your comment comes off like you live in a left wing enclave and you have no real human experience with people with differing believes. Which is funny, because that is also how modern journalism comes off - privileged white rich kids at liberal schools who then shuttle down to the equally liberal newsroom, never interacting with half the country.
There are plenty of right-wing journalists who have similar quality to left wing. Publishers like The National Review have fine writers and it is hard to argue the a publication founded by William F. Buckley is some liberal organisation.
The "problem" is that all these organizations are critical of Trump too.
Certain other commentary magazines (eg Weekly Standard and Commentary), think tanks (AEI, Heritage, Cato), business newspapers (Wall Street Journal).
I do think there is an issue in that these sort of commentators have much less visibility than before in American politics, so it's easy to form a negative opinion about right wing journalism. Partially as a result, I can name several commentators that have migrated from "Republican conservative" to a more "independent" oriented stance. Names like David Frum, Andrew Sullivan, Bruce Bartlett, David Brooks, and George Will come to mind. None of these names are 100% "liberal", neither are still today. They just don't fit well with right-wing media that has increasingly become populist.
It is probably my bias, but I can't think of a similar type of left-wing commentator that's made the same transition. On the other hand, I've noticed increased populism in more left-oriented media too...
This is a shame, because even when these type of commentators were at their most raucous, I always got the impression that both sides respected each other. (You saw the same thing at, say the Supreme Court, where Scalia and Ginsburg were friends.) A lot of media these days in contrast is extremely us vs. them and tribal oriented, with seemingly no respect for the other side at all.
I'm not sure I follow. It sounds like you're blaming blogs and online media for the decline in credibility of newspapers.
Newspapers aren't credible anymore because they continuously make the conscious decision to run bullshit stories full of twisted truths in the pursuit of sales, as they have always done. The only reason they had any credibility before is because people blindly accepted what they said without the tools to verify it.
They've had the same amount of journalistic integrity as they've always had. I.E plenty until there's a buck to be made by forgoing it.
> Newspapers aren't credible anymore because they continuously make the conscious decision to run bullshit stories full of twisted truths in the pursuit of sales, as they have always done.
Sources for that claim please?
Of course there were always plenty of papers that operated like that (tabloids etc), but I doubt they were as influential in main political discussion as e.g. Fox News seems to be today.
>I doubt they were as influential in main political discussion as e.g. Fox News seems to be today.
Why do you assume that? Absolute garbage tabloids have been influencing elections and dominating mainstream political discourse in western countries for decades[1]. In the UK an entire political ideology was created to try and work around the influence of right wing mass media (spoiler: the answer was allowing media barons to dictate policy).
If anything tabloid influence is lower today than in the past. Compare the result of the 1992 UK general election with the 2017 one.
You've clearly not seen the UK press. The Daily Mail has been around for decades, and has quality standards roughly on par with Fox News at best. The tabloids have spent years posting any old speculation they can find and sometimes even hacking people's phones for information.
And the more respectable papers have generally had their own problems with reporting standards. The likes of the Guardian and the Telegraph should be on the lower end of what's considered journalism, not the upper one.
Honestly, the introduction of online news sources has probably helped in a lot of ways, because it meant people might at last be checking information from sources other than tabloids. There's at least a niche for good quality journalism online now rather than it being an 'occasional' fixture in some newspapers on a good day.
Ah, the UK press. How did that happen? Why do the British like that sort of thing?
And I'd also add that the Greek press is also garbage. They don't turn a profit at all and are simply propaganda for their owner's point of view. Their owners usually being family-owned conglomerates. It's as if the Kochs started their own newspaper. I get the impression this is actually pretty common in many countries, particularly eastern European ones.
It's relative. From my point of view as an outsider the US print media scene appears to be dominated by what I'd describe as broadsheets (NYT, Washington Post, WSJ, LA Times etc). These papers can at times be pretty bad and I don't agree with the editorial position of any of them but even something like the WSJ which will publish crazy climate change conspiracy theories is in a different league to the papers that dominate in the UK: The Sun and Daily Mail. Imagine that the most widely read US paper by far was the National Enquirer and that it was treated as a serious and important paper by other media outlets and political parties.
I can't help laughing at your quaint idea that spreading misinformation "at least once over the past year" is a major offence. Dozens of major inaccuracies (with blatant political motivation) per day is the kind of standard we are talking about here.
Not to mention the abhorrent behaviour of journalists towards victims of crime etc in trying to get stories, which is a whole other side to the UK media which probably isn't appreciated from the outside.
Let's stress – some of the UK press. The Express, Daily Mail, the Sun, and so on. Tabloid journalism is still a thing, and has been present for an awfully long time globally – it's not a new thing, nor particular to the UK.
But then there's also The Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Economist, the FT – all of which have bias and flaws in their own way, but are indisputably higher-quality.
The mistake is in assuming that there can ever really be a realistic, completely-free-from-influence publication. In reality, we have to rely on a diversity of publications, funding models and political viewpoints, and make informed decisions. This needs to be backed by strong FOI laws and a culture of press freedom, which sadly is something which the UK has not been doing well at recently.
+1. It's very hard to take seriously reputable sources when the work they produce is of such poor quality. Lies, partial truth, clear lobby/politics/companies influences, lack of fact checking... Even the correct ones, doing a decent work, don't provide much interesting analysis or insight.
That's why many people are on sites like HN: we get often more values from the comments that the articles themself.
Like most things in Australia I was impressed by Australian mainstream news outlets (coming from the US). I have a memory of reading the comments after an article on a real estate related story published by one of the bigger newspapers and being genuinely impressed by the quality of the reader discussion.
That kind of feedback and engagement is the only thing that can keep journalism standards high I think.
Can you remember which newspaper? There are second/third-tier news sources in Australia that might have quality discussion, but generally it's pretty appalling.
I haven't seen any of them make a solid play at community-oriented commentary - things like persistent identities, karma systems, etc. Baffles me when sites like HN and Reddit are visited as much for their comments as the source articles. So many of the comments on mainstream news sites are drive-by insults instead.
"Actual news organizations" don't exist in the sense we'd like. They're all agenda driven and constantly lie by omission.
Breitbart is shamelessly pro-Trump. They will publish stories that others won't but also won't publish anything counter to their narrative.
The Guardian, which someone else mentioned, is massively left-leaning and is also very selective about what they cover. Their articles are often poorly thought out and extremely regressive.
Both sources are poison if taken in isolation, without the antidote of the other.
The MSM have earned the lack of trust they receive. Anyone who wants to end up receiving an approximation of overall truth will consume a variety of sources with different biases.
I unfortunately and reluctantly am forced to agree with you. Except about Breitbart being legitimate (sorry, can't do it).
My dad explained this to me very crudely some years ago, (but as he's a Daily Mail reader I dismiss everything he says by default).
In this case though, it really does require you to read broadly to get out of your opinion bubble.
The BBC is a perfect case study of this. It's got a charter that is supposed to make it explicitly neutral, but of course that's unenforceable in reality (what's biased and not is going to be a matter of opinion), as evidenced by their approach anytime the question of the license fee comes up in public discourse.
There's probably money to be made by crawling a variety of news sources, throwing the output into an AI fanoogler, and using it to write a separate article that balances the views on the given topic as a separate news site.
Ideally, we'd all read something like Reuters or AP* . The problem is that because there isn't any bias, the stories tend to be quite dry. While that's great for impartiality, people get bored reading it. The BBC has a problem where they have to be impartial and non-accusatory, so articles are plagued with quote marks (e.g "The minister said he was 'shocked' ").
The majority of people read the papers because they want to read something sensationalist from their point of view.
* Actually what everyone should do is read a spectrum of papers from left to right wing. This avoids the bias problem because it becomes immediately obvious and it forces you to think about what the real story might be.
I honestly don't believe breitbart and the guardian are equally bad. There have always been varying degrees of bias and different degrees of standards.
The right spins this as everyone is equally biased in order to justify there readers picking their own alternative facts to justify whatever positions they hold however improbable.
You may be correct but surely you recognize that the left can just as easily be accused of the same bias you attribute to the right?
The real problem is diverging narratives and very little constructive communication between. Both sides have very valid concerns that aren't understood by the other.
I didn't really equate them, I just used as them as examples since they'd both already been mentioned.
Also, don't you think that suggesting Breitbart is worse than the Guardian might point to your own bias?
The Guardian is designed to look less like a tabloid, which gives the appearance of it being more honest - but is it really a less biased source of news? It's very hard to judge such things.
I've been reading the Guardian for a long time and I've noticed it's been embracing some of the more unsavory elements of the left in recent years. Someone else might contend those elements are warranted.
The differences in news reporting today seems to come down to the values we prioritize and the narratives that push them.
That's effectively what is happening with media consumption. Beause of special interests and ideologies, it's very hard to tell how biased or honest information really is without doing a lot of research.
Ideally, journalists would do that research for us and present the information as objectively as possible. And we would trust them. But doing that takes a lot of time and doesn't result in a lot of clicks.
>I've been reading the Guardian for a long time and I've noticed it's been embracing some of the more unsavory elements of the left in recent years.
What elements? If you mean deliberately antagonistic opinion pieces from transphobic feminists (TERFs) then yes you're right. But I'm guessing that's probably not what you were referring to. If you mean run of the mill socialists then I can't see any truth to your claim - there's a small handful now and it's mostly the same small handful they published 10 years ago (Monbiot, Jones, previously Milne, and a couple of others). The Guardian as an institution hates socialism, even if it occasionally allows a mild opinion piece from a socialist about how it might be nice to raise the top rate of tax by 1% to pay for hospitals.
Other than an increase in the amount of clickbait the Guardian is mostly the same as it was 10 or 20 years ago. The editorial position has actually shifted to the right slightly since Viner took over. But historically it's always been a liberal paper. It supported the SDP, has supported the Lib Dems at various times, supported Blair and supported Iraq.
Part of liberalism involves giving voice to any old opinion no matter how dangerous, crazy, offensive or wrong, at least as long as it comes from the elite class and doesn't do anything as gauche as question the property rights of the wealthy middle class readership (coincidentally this leads to great clickbait on a lot of social and religious issues). So that's why you see the Guardian doing things like publishing articles by Ergodan or other fairly repulsive people as well as hosting flamewars over atheism/islam/feminism/cultural appropriation etc. It's not being left wing that leads to any of that. If it was a left wing paper it would contain far fewer articles of that type because the left wing generally doesn't subscribe to a "free market of ideas" like liberals do.
I can think of several common opinions surrounding Islam, gender and culture that the Guardian would not publish today. So I don't believe its as liberal as you say.
It is possible to be biased and still behave in a fair minded way. In some media the trend is towards intentional misreporting to drive a particular agenda. This does not exactly promote constructive communication. And when the publication aligns with your own views it is easier to forgive.
It'd be more productive to compare the substance of articles and not their clickbait headlines. For example that last headline in your list is incendiary but the points it makes are well cited.
From memory here are a couple of Guardian headlines:
"Your worst nightmare: a successful Donald Trump Presidency"
"Have we reached peak beard?"
And here's a couple they're serving up right now:
"'Soon you'll be able to afford a BBC man' / Emily Maitlis mocks pay gap at conference"
"'Bigger than yours' / Randy Newman writes song about Donald Trump's penis"
"Peter Dutton's new mega department will streamline dog whistling and fear whipping"
Not exactly indicative of unbiased, quality journalism. But never mind, because how much do cherry picked headlines really tell us?
The "click bait headlines" are part of their substance. And, in many instances, it is the substance -- as it's the only part of the article people do read.
With the exception of Peter Dutton's new mega department will streamline dog whistling and fear whipping I cant see how you could compare these with the Breitbart articles in anyway.
For example, "Your worst nightmare: a successful Donald Trump Presidency" is an article critical of the left(!) The headline itself comes from the conservative British historian Niall Ferguson. The complete quote is:
“I think one of the things Guardian readers, and their counterparts on the American coasts, don’t want to think about is the possibility that despite his obvious ineptitude, Trump might actually be successful.
“I said last summer to a bunch of liberal friends: ‘Your worst nightmare is not a Trump presidency; it’s a successful Trump presidency.’ The successful Trump presidency scenario is one in which, despite it all, the economy does better thanks to deregulation and tax cuts, foreign policy delivers some big wins on North Korea, the Middle East.
“It doesn’t take an awful lot for a president to start looking good. If the expectations start really low, which they have done, it may be one win, and I definitely don’t rule out a kind of ‘success in spite of himself’ scenario. And then you begin to wonder if a left-of-Clinton Democrat in 2020 would be blown away. We’ll see. The fun thing about doing history is you really can’t tell at this point which way it will go. It could quite easily go Jimmy Carter and he could be a lame duck.”
I just don't see how you can compare this to the Breitbart "reporting".
>The Guardian, which someone else mentioned, is massively left-leaning
It really isn't. It's a liberal paper not a left wing one. That's not a theoretical distinction; you just need to look at their coverage of the UK Labour party over the last 2 years to see that.
It does publish a range of people in the opinion pages, including conservatives and socialists, but the reporters and most importantly editors are nearly all liberals. That's what informs which articles get published and which anonymous "senior labour party insider" they quote in the headlines and front page news stories.
Not saying I like the current climate at all but TV stations and newspapers have always had their own bias and "newsfeed" so to speak. Is it really easier today than before to surround yourself with news that lacks credibility? There's always been junk newspapers and junk TV news channels.
People need to develop their own critical thinking skills and not rely on e.g. a specific newspaper they believe to have standards to do their thinking for them. I mean do you personally have an issue with identifying inaccurate news stories? If not, why not? People that want to believe obviously made up news are going to find some way to get their fix of news like that whether Google or Facebook filter it out for them or not.
Is there an app/portal that, at least, just tries to provide unbiased and unadultrated news (just aggregation; if not the source of the article/post) for events from
(a.) particular country (b.) around the world (c.) and maybe few topics of interest (or not)
with a clean and simple interface w/o those fancy "social features" and not based on "trending" and "highly voted" features and charges a fee?
Took long enough. The next step will be adding a Google+ integrated commenting system.
But why?
Attention (which is Google's main product) is now captivated by the social networks. Google must adapt or lose market share. What is interesting is how they have not been able to really break into social. What about Google makes it so difficult for them to do just that?
It's very important that people working on things like human social interaction be able to do things like invert binary trees. They only hire the best.
I suspect you're correct, despite any assurances to the contrary. And any bias might not even be by design but rather just a result of the biases of the people who make the feature.
It's hard to believe this is going to happen to google.com
Google is, if nothing else, obsessed with metrics; unless they'd A/B/... tested this to death, there is zero chance they'll roll it out to their homepage.
I can't believe it, and it's not mentioned anywhere on their blog post.
To be fair, most people probably search from the chrome toolbar now, but even so, I imagine at most, we'll see a staged roll out to a cohort to test it.
Being obsessed with metrics is the exact reason something like this would go through.
All companies that design to metrics instead of vision always ship the worst UI/UX crimes. This is the ideology we have to thank for things like the lightbox sign up forms that block or lock out content if you try to browse without an account on FB/Pintrest etc.
You're assuming the metric Google is designing for is still how fast a user gets what they want off site. What if the metric they're designing for is how long someone spends in the Google ecosystem?
Have we gone back in time? The idea of a newsfeed is ancient, pre-dating the interne. The only difference is that this time around the feed only shows you what you want to see.
I had to double check to see if I had woken up from a coma and it was in fact April 1, 2018, but no. What a way to destroy the most iconic webpage in history.
Didn't they try basically this before, then had it fail and discontinue in the form of iGoogle(2005-2013)? The idea of google going back to that is just nuts.
At least DuckDuckGo has got the search page concept right.
They definitely discontinued it, but that doesn't mean it failed. What do you think made them kill it? At the time, it felt like textbook Google capriciousness (see Reader, etc).
I use Bing's news section (on their home page) all the time, syncs with Cortana. I assume this will be similar. I'm sure they will let you hide it, even Bing does that.
Interesting. On first glance I was thinking the article was pertaining to Google Plus.
It was talking about the website after all - "Google is adding a personalised Facebook-style news feed to its homepage - Google.com".
This made it a lot interesting. Google Plus doesn't seem to be making it in our country. But Google Search has been here for a long time. The front end of it didn't change much for as long as I can remember. (The back end though seem to be mutating like a monster.)
I wonder how they're planning to target who sees what kind of content. But I think they pretty much have enough data gathered from all the email accounts and search results that everyone has been feeding them.
Looking forward to this update and more importantly how people will react to it.
Who visits google.com anyway? I am pretty sure majority of those users who aren't interested in seeing these news are already using google search via browser address bar. Only those who go to google.com will see these news , and they seem to be an exact type of people who would enjoy such content and spend hours browsing it generating more revenue to google
I don't, but I like google now on my phone, and occasionally hit news.google. so, if google.com includes those two, I might start to visit it while on desktop.
> Google is known for its sparse homepage, which, though mostly white space, has, according to analytics firm Alexa Internet, become the world's most-visited website.
Majority of regular users (who do not care or even know about any kind of online privacy, open web, net neutrality etc.) I interact with go to google.com, write down e.g. "facebook" and then log in! They don't even know they can use url bar for searching (let alone typing xyz.com directly). It makes my blood boil every time I see that. I try to explain, they usually just don't care to listen/understand. Coming from other thread about Firefox marketshare, it's mostly this kind of users that kill the open web and help billion-dollar walled-gardens prosper. There are billions of them.
188 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 231 ms ] threadAnyone know where the BBC found this confirmation?
I don't see any reason to believe it would affect the site.
It just seems anomalous that such a great change would be announced with so little fanfare (a single sentence in the article). I need to see confirmation before I believe it.
If they're actually adding it to Google.com that's newsworthy, but i think that's just the BBC misinterpreting something.
I would have bought into the other Plus, your social network, but you fucked over your base product (search) during its launch, and then went all "real names" et al. on us.
There might be a more-permanent way to set it if you are logged-in, but I don't usually do that for Google for privacy reasons.
>"To provide information from diverse perspectives, news stories may have multiple viewpoints from a variety of sources... and, when available, you'll be able to fact check," the company said in a blog post.
I'm growing increasingly uncomfortable with how Google, Facebook etc. are now positioning themselves in terms of what news and sources they believe we should and should not consume.
If this piece is true and this update isn't confined to the Google app then I think it may be the final nail in the coffin of my relationship with Google products.
I agree with your sentiment and I too am uncomfortable with it, but we the individuals should take responsibility and ownership of our consumption. It sounds like you are preparing to do so, but I don't have high hopes for society at large.
I might extrapolate that at some point I would have pinned the blame entirely on Google, and then rattled about how they have a "social responsibility" and perhaps that's still true. But I am seeing that really, we took the spade to dig a flowerbed, and haven't wavered a bit as it's deepened into a grave.
With that being said, I've some feeling that the "consent" FB and Google have from its users to essentially bulk collect and analyze their data may largely stem from ignorance as to what is being collected and how it's being used i.e. the relationship between the content one produces in Gmail and the ads that same person receives.
That's a tightly coupled, straightforward relationship too. I've no doubt that the average person has zero idea what is involved when Google touts that it can now confidently track an ad being served/viewed online to an in-store, in-person purchase offline.
Then again, with the Snowden leaks and similar and the absolutely apathetic (at best) reaction from the public at large, maybe convenience merely trumps all and will forever more.
So either basic needs or some basic needs + emotions.
If people have a decent job, a house and a car they'll basically never rebel.
[0]: http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/dwayne-the-rock-johnson-...
That's the trouble with fact check. It gives the illusion of that you're seeing the entire picture when you could just be looking through a keyhole and not know it.
Sad.
I love DuckDuckGo for their no-following and no-tracking you policy. I admire that and want to support them. But yet, I know that many, many of the queries are usually yield far better results on Google.
I'm just hoping that with time and enough people using DuckDuckGo, it will get a lot better.
Trade offs.
I think there’s a middle ground though - and Google is far far on one side of it.
Searching for something like "programatically create credit memo magento" yielded the user documentation on how to create a credit memo while Googles first result was the relevant API page with the second being forum posts explaining how to do what I wanted.
If you need specific results and don't get them, you go back to Google.
DDG is my default, and I'm quite happy with it.
Also: I like that they're experimenting, but come on. Replacing a settings menu with a list of very specific yes/no questions that are added to that list as you encounter them - that's just wrong. You don't even get a benefit of being able to scroll through a settings screen to discover what features are available...
An early RSS-based aggregator -- but you could (and can) choose your feeds, if you like.
Duckduckgo seems like the obvious alternative search engine these days, but how much of their own indexing do they do? It seems from some casual googling (no, the irony of that is not lost on me) that they mostly rely on Bing or Yahoo as the backend.
Some thoughts:
Search engines should be a lot easier to build in 2017 than they were two decades ago when Google started out. We don't have to store the index in DRAM to avoid hard drive seek times like they did; we can use SSDs.
Having a good quality ranking metric could offset shortcomings in the size of the index. PageRank is okay, but we could do better by punishing sites that link to low-quality content.
Speaking of PageRank, the PageRank patent expires in a couple years, I believe. So, constructing ranking algorithms that build on PageRank will soon be an option.
It's hard to compete with Google and Bing in terms of hardware resources, but probably the minimum investment to build a useful search engine is probably at lot lower than what we might think.
A lot of the basic software infrastructure is probably already written. I don't know what the state-of-the-art in web crawlers is, but in 2017 I doubt that one would have to write one from scratch.
Maybe there's a way to build a shared/federated distributed index.
Running the project as a non-profit might be the best way to maintain trust of users. Not having any ads at all (like Wikipedia) might be a good way to one-up Google's previous policy of no ads/news on the front page.
Also, don't google have loads more ranking algorithms than just pagerank?
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana
It's a psychological hack, and the promoters of this technology know it.
Though I agree that the newsfeed tends to put these things next to the NYT or the Guardian, I feel like "page rank"-y stuff could help smooth this out. I've already seen improvements to my FB newsfeed for this kind of stuff over the yearse.
Can't speak on the topic of NYT, but at least in the case of the Guardian, it's clearly lowered its standards over the last several years to find a market.
(I still read it, but it's slowly becoming a left-wing Daily Mail cough Owen Jones cough, which is really disappointing).
Great story, but the journalism was lacking significantly.
I'd love to know what the go-to center-left news source is over here. So far I haven't found it...
edit to add: their core business isn't actually selling ads on news articles, which also helps quite a bit.
I was always under the impression that Bloomberg was the non-WWE version of CNBC (i.e. primarily markets news, without Cramer's hysterics).
Will have to check it out again if its got broader coverage than I realized. Thanks for the tip!
•••••••••>>http://ow.ly/P0wk30aVXfN
Was there? Because last I checked all that these so called 'reputable' sources of news seem to put out is biased garbage full of misleading data and often blatant lies.
I've seen better journalism from bloody buzzfeed than I have from some of the "proper" news networks in Australia...
The inculcation of this sentiment is precisely the effect I'm referring to. The waters have become so muddied with nonsense that no one can tell right from wrong anymore. And thus, actual news organizations with trained reporters and fact checkers and a tradition of at least being held to some kind of accountability lose all credibility. It's not a perfect system, but it's one which evolved to solve the exact problems we are facing here. There's a reason Trump attacks the media's credibility on a daily basis. Throwing your hands up and saying "it's all fake news" is precisely what the propagandists want.
The reasons are ratings and political ideology. They know that a lot of people hate Trump so they attack him. Any evidence of wrongdoing on Trump's part is merely a happy extra for the MSM.
If Obama did the same things that Trump does, do you think the MSM would behave the same way?
The MSM have cried wolf so many times that now half the country will not listen if they actually find something solid against Trump.
Whatever your position on Trump, it's hard to think of the MSM as being driven by actual journalism. And that's a real shame for the small number of journalists in the MSM who actually have integrity.
There are plenty of right-wing journalists who have similar quality to left wing. Publishers like The National Review have fine writers and it is hard to argue the a publication founded by William F. Buckley is some liberal organisation.
The "problem" is that all these organizations are critical of Trump too.
And who else?
I do think there is an issue in that these sort of commentators have much less visibility than before in American politics, so it's easy to form a negative opinion about right wing journalism. Partially as a result, I can name several commentators that have migrated from "Republican conservative" to a more "independent" oriented stance. Names like David Frum, Andrew Sullivan, Bruce Bartlett, David Brooks, and George Will come to mind. None of these names are 100% "liberal", neither are still today. They just don't fit well with right-wing media that has increasingly become populist.
It is probably my bias, but I can't think of a similar type of left-wing commentator that's made the same transition. On the other hand, I've noticed increased populism in more left-oriented media too...
This is a shame, because even when these type of commentators were at their most raucous, I always got the impression that both sides respected each other. (You saw the same thing at, say the Supreme Court, where Scalia and Ginsburg were friends.) A lot of media these days in contrast is extremely us vs. them and tribal oriented, with seemingly no respect for the other side at all.
1. He's the most powerful head of state on the planet. 2. He's demonstrably not fit for the job. 3. IT'S THEIR DAMN JOB.
I don't even like the man, yet I am compelled to defend him against what I see as a greater injustice.
Newspapers aren't credible anymore because they continuously make the conscious decision to run bullshit stories full of twisted truths in the pursuit of sales, as they have always done. The only reason they had any credibility before is because people blindly accepted what they said without the tools to verify it.
They've had the same amount of journalistic integrity as they've always had. I.E plenty until there's a buck to be made by forgoing it.
Sources for that claim please?
Of course there were always plenty of papers that operated like that (tabloids etc), but I doubt they were as influential in main political discussion as e.g. Fox News seems to be today.
Why do you assume that? Absolute garbage tabloids have been influencing elections and dominating mainstream political discourse in western countries for decades[1]. In the UK an entire political ideology was created to try and work around the influence of right wing mass media (spoiler: the answer was allowing media barons to dictate policy).
If anything tabloid influence is lower today than in the past. Compare the result of the 1992 UK general election with the 2017 one.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_The_Sun_Wot_Won_It
And the more respectable papers have generally had their own problems with reporting standards. The likes of the Guardian and the Telegraph should be on the lower end of what's considered journalism, not the upper one.
Honestly, the introduction of online news sources has probably helped in a lot of ways, because it meant people might at last be checking information from sources other than tabloids. There's at least a niche for good quality journalism online now rather than it being an 'occasional' fixture in some newspapers on a good day.
And I'd also add that the Greek press is also garbage. They don't turn a profit at all and are simply propaganda for their owner's point of view. Their owners usually being family-owned conglomerates. It's as if the Kochs started their own newspaper. I get the impression this is actually pretty common in many countries, particularly eastern European ones.
I find LeMondediplomatique (in all it's countries regions) to be a light in the darkness of propaganda. Check it out
Maybe the US just kind of lucked out there.
I can't think of one "reputable" US news outlet that hasn't knowingly spread misinformation or half-truths at least once over the past year.
The "good" sources are generally the least bad ones that happen to confirm your biases more than the rest.
I can't help laughing at your quaint idea that spreading misinformation "at least once over the past year" is a major offence. Dozens of major inaccuracies (with blatant political motivation) per day is the kind of standard we are talking about here.
Not to mention the abhorrent behaviour of journalists towards victims of crime etc in trying to get stories, which is a whole other side to the UK media which probably isn't appreciated from the outside.
But then there's also The Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Economist, the FT – all of which have bias and flaws in their own way, but are indisputably higher-quality.
The mistake is in assuming that there can ever really be a realistic, completely-free-from-influence publication. In reality, we have to rely on a diversity of publications, funding models and political viewpoints, and make informed decisions. This needs to be backed by strong FOI laws and a culture of press freedom, which sadly is something which the UK has not been doing well at recently.
Please point out which stories, specifically, are "blatant lies", or "biased garbage".
WSJ:
- Investors Brace for Clues on ECB’s Tapering Plans
- Fed Faces Inflation Riddle
- Top Court Revises Trump Travel Ban Scope
- Bank Earnings Highlight Diverging Paths Since Crisis
- How a Saudi Prince Unseated Heir Apparent
- Trump Urges GOP to Seek Agreement on Health Measure
- Sen. John McCain Diagnosed With Brain Cancer
- Trump Jr., Kushner, Manafort to Speak to Senate Panels
- Where Will Banks Go After Brexit? Frankfurt Takes Lead
- Tech Stocks Eclipse Record From Dot-Com Era
- Court Overturns Convictions of Two in Libor Scandal
NYT:
- Two Weeks on Ice in McMurdo Station, Antarctica
- McCain Has Brain Cancer; Tumor Was Found in Surgery
- Citing Recusal, Trump Says He Wouldn’t Have Hired Sessions
- Trump Loans From Deutsche Bank Face Regulatory Scrutin
- China Woos Myanmar as U.S. Focus in the Region Wane
- Getting High in Uruguay Is Now a Pharmacy Stop Away
- Somalis in Minneapolis Shocked by Police Shooting
- President Persists on Health Bill, Urging Senators to Revive It
- Opinion: Gustavo Dudamel: A Better Way for Venezuela
- Opinion: Charlie Gard and Our Moral Confusion
- Editorial: The Dark History of Defining ‘Family’
-How Fear of Falling Explains the Love of Trump
-Trump is his own worst enemy.
-If Dr. Trump were your surgeon.
But "Biased garbage" I think was part of the original statement.
If this doesn't speak to bias of a publication I'm not sure what will. Besides I'm not sure all of the general public understands the difference.
That's why many people are on sites like HN: we get often more values from the comments that the articles themself.
That kind of feedback and engagement is the only thing that can keep journalism standards high I think.
I haven't seen any of them make a solid play at community-oriented commentary - things like persistent identities, karma systems, etc. Baffles me when sites like HN and Reddit are visited as much for their comments as the source articles. So many of the comments on mainstream news sites are drive-by insults instead.
Breitbart is shamelessly pro-Trump. They will publish stories that others won't but also won't publish anything counter to their narrative.
The Guardian, which someone else mentioned, is massively left-leaning and is also very selective about what they cover. Their articles are often poorly thought out and extremely regressive.
Both sources are poison if taken in isolation, without the antidote of the other.
The MSM have earned the lack of trust they receive. Anyone who wants to end up receiving an approximation of overall truth will consume a variety of sources with different biases.
My dad explained this to me very crudely some years ago, (but as he's a Daily Mail reader I dismiss everything he says by default).
In this case though, it really does require you to read broadly to get out of your opinion bubble.
The BBC is a perfect case study of this. It's got a charter that is supposed to make it explicitly neutral, but of course that's unenforceable in reality (what's biased and not is going to be a matter of opinion), as evidenced by their approach anytime the question of the license fee comes up in public discourse.
There's probably money to be made by crawling a variety of news sources, throwing the output into an AI fanoogler, and using it to write a separate article that balances the views on the given topic as a separate news site.
Obviously I'll require majority equity. Fanoogler R&D isn't cheap you know.
I just googled it in case it already exists and has offensive overtones, and this turned up:
"To scam someone out of something they owe you but do not want to give you."
Deep, yo.
edit: But yeah, organizations of people with biases can't be perfectly neutral
The majority of people read the papers because they want to read something sensationalist from their point of view.
* Actually what everyone should do is read a spectrum of papers from left to right wing. This avoids the bias problem because it becomes immediately obvious and it forces you to think about what the real story might be.
The right spins this as everyone is equally biased in order to justify there readers picking their own alternative facts to justify whatever positions they hold however improbable.
The real problem is diverging narratives and very little constructive communication between. Both sides have very valid concerns that aren't understood by the other.
Also, don't you think that suggesting Breitbart is worse than the Guardian might point to your own bias?
The Guardian is designed to look less like a tabloid, which gives the appearance of it being more honest - but is it really a less biased source of news? It's very hard to judge such things.
I've been reading the Guardian for a long time and I've noticed it's been embracing some of the more unsavory elements of the left in recent years. Someone else might contend those elements are warranted.
The differences in news reporting today seems to come down to the values we prioritize and the narratives that push them.
Ideally, journalists would do that research for us and present the information as objectively as possible. And we would trust them. But doing that takes a lot of time and doesn't result in a lot of clicks.
What elements? If you mean deliberately antagonistic opinion pieces from transphobic feminists (TERFs) then yes you're right. But I'm guessing that's probably not what you were referring to. If you mean run of the mill socialists then I can't see any truth to your claim - there's a small handful now and it's mostly the same small handful they published 10 years ago (Monbiot, Jones, previously Milne, and a couple of others). The Guardian as an institution hates socialism, even if it occasionally allows a mild opinion piece from a socialist about how it might be nice to raise the top rate of tax by 1% to pay for hospitals.
Other than an increase in the amount of clickbait the Guardian is mostly the same as it was 10 or 20 years ago. The editorial position has actually shifted to the right slightly since Viner took over. But historically it's always been a liberal paper. It supported the SDP, has supported the Lib Dems at various times, supported Blair and supported Iraq.
Part of liberalism involves giving voice to any old opinion no matter how dangerous, crazy, offensive or wrong, at least as long as it comes from the elite class and doesn't do anything as gauche as question the property rights of the wealthy middle class readership (coincidentally this leads to great clickbait on a lot of social and religious issues). So that's why you see the Guardian doing things like publishing articles by Ergodan or other fairly repulsive people as well as hosting flamewars over atheism/islam/feminism/cultural appropriation etc. It's not being left wing that leads to any of that. If it was a left wing paper it would contain far fewer articles of that type because the left wing generally doesn't subscribe to a "free market of ideas" like liberals do.
It's very easy to whip out an accusation like "This would never be published" if you never say what "this" is.
For a massively left-leaning publication, you need to look to something like the Morning Star: https://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/
It's comforting to think that Breitbart and The Guardian are equally biased, and if you average them together, you get the truth.
But I'd challenge you to find headlines on The Guardian that match Breitbart stories like these:
"Pro-Nazi Roots of Planned Parenthood Revealed"
"The Solution to Online Harassment is Simple: Women Should Log Off"
"Huma Abedin Most Likely a Saudi Spy With Deep Inarguable Connections to Global Terrorist Entity"
"Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy"
From memory here are a couple of Guardian headlines:
"Your worst nightmare: a successful Donald Trump Presidency"
"Have we reached peak beard?"
And here's a couple they're serving up right now:
"'Soon you'll be able to afford a BBC man' / Emily Maitlis mocks pay gap at conference"
"'Bigger than yours' / Randy Newman writes song about Donald Trump's penis"
"Peter Dutton's new mega department will streamline dog whistling and fear whipping"
Not exactly indicative of unbiased, quality journalism. But never mind, because how much do cherry picked headlines really tell us?
For example, "Your worst nightmare: a successful Donald Trump Presidency" is an article critical of the left(!) The headline itself comes from the conservative British historian Niall Ferguson. The complete quote is:
“I think one of the things Guardian readers, and their counterparts on the American coasts, don’t want to think about is the possibility that despite his obvious ineptitude, Trump might actually be successful.
“I said last summer to a bunch of liberal friends: ‘Your worst nightmare is not a Trump presidency; it’s a successful Trump presidency.’ The successful Trump presidency scenario is one in which, despite it all, the economy does better thanks to deregulation and tax cuts, foreign policy delivers some big wins on North Korea, the Middle East.
“It doesn’t take an awful lot for a president to start looking good. If the expectations start really low, which they have done, it may be one win, and I definitely don’t rule out a kind of ‘success in spite of himself’ scenario. And then you begin to wonder if a left-of-Clinton Democrat in 2020 would be blown away. We’ll see. The fun thing about doing history is you really can’t tell at this point which way it will go. It could quite easily go Jimmy Carter and he could be a lame duck.”
I just don't see how you can compare this to the Breitbart "reporting".
It really isn't. It's a liberal paper not a left wing one. That's not a theoretical distinction; you just need to look at their coverage of the UK Labour party over the last 2 years to see that.
It does publish a range of people in the opinion pages, including conservatives and socialists, but the reporters and most importantly editors are nearly all liberals. That's what informs which articles get published and which anonymous "senior labour party insider" they quote in the headlines and front page news stories.
People need to develop their own critical thinking skills and not rely on e.g. a specific newspaper they believe to have standards to do their thinking for them. I mean do you personally have an issue with identifying inaccurate news stories? If not, why not? People that want to believe obviously made up news are going to find some way to get their fix of news like that whether Google or Facebook filter it out for them or not.
I'd also like to remind you, it's not just quality of coverage that matters, it's what you cover.
(a.) particular country (b.) around the world (c.) and maybe few topics of interest (or not)
with a clean and simple interface w/o those fancy "social features" and not based on "trending" and "highly voted" features and charges a fee?
"i dont need to know about a person i will never meet or a place i will never go."
Most of any media is junk
But why?
Attention (which is Google's main product) is now captivated by the social networks. Google must adapt or lose market share. What is interesting is how they have not been able to really break into social. What about Google makes it so difficult for them to do just that?
Google is, if nothing else, obsessed with metrics; unless they'd A/B/... tested this to death, there is zero chance they'll roll it out to their homepage.
I can't believe it, and it's not mentioned anywhere on their blog post.
To be fair, most people probably search from the chrome toolbar now, but even so, I imagine at most, we'll see a staged roll out to a cohort to test it.
Rarely do I see them searching using the url box. That's where web addresses go silly!
All companies that design to metrics instead of vision always ship the worst UI/UX crimes. This is the ideology we have to thank for things like the lightbox sign up forms that block or lock out content if you try to browse without an account on FB/Pintrest etc.
You're assuming the metric Google is designing for is still how fast a user gets what they want off site. What if the metric they're designing for is how long someone spends in the Google ecosystem?
However, one could easily start using "startpage.com" or duckduckgo.com with "!google <your search string>" - both deliver results from google!
Scary shit.
At least DuckDuckGo has got the search page concept right.
It was talking about the website after all - "Google is adding a personalised Facebook-style news feed to its homepage - Google.com".
This made it a lot interesting. Google Plus doesn't seem to be making it in our country. But Google Search has been here for a long time. The front end of it didn't change much for as long as I can remember. (The back end though seem to be mutating like a monster.)
I wonder how they're planning to target who sees what kind of content. But I think they pretty much have enough data gathered from all the email accounts and search results that everyone has been feeding them.
Looking forward to this update and more importantly how people will react to it.
> Google is known for its sparse homepage, which, though mostly white space, has, according to analytics firm Alexa Internet, become the world's most-visited website.