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Are You Ogling Google News? 60

Posted by Cliff from the standing-news-on-its-head dept.
heytal asks: "Yes, It's old news, and you all have been to Google News at least once. And yes, it crawls Slashdot and considers it as one of the news sources too ;-).This article is an interesting article on how things work, and how Google News would change the industry. What I want to ask the Slashdot users is their experience with Google News, how much they use it, and how has it changed their news surfing habbits?"
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Are You Ogling Google News? More

Are You Ogling Google News?

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  • I've tried it a few times over the last couple days, but find that it just misses too much news, mostly in the business sector.

    Just give me my Wall Street Journal every morning and I'm happy. For breaking news, I just (regular) Google the topic and usually get all I want from that.

    ~Chaltek
  • I'm not reading it because I don't like the layout much, and it has more than I'm normally interested in reading.
    This does not mean that I wouldn't use it for particular stories of interest.
    • I really enjoy the layout.. seems to put so much unformation on one page. And it covers news from all around the world, which is so much better than the usual sites. Even cnn world doesn't seem to have as much content.

  • It's not the New York Times (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LordNimon ( 85072 ) on Wednesday September 25, 2002 @05:56PM (#4331351)
    The NYT has professionals that evaluate all the news stories and make judgements as to what to put up front. Because they're very good at it, you get high-quality journalism on relevant topics on the front page. Trash news sites like ABCNews.com and CNN.com think that "American Idol" is just as important as the situation with Iraq.

    However, Google News has an advantage in that it covers news sites from all over the world, and presumably the more coverage an issue gets, the more prominently it is displayed. This technically provides less bias in news stories (i.e. not so US-centric).

    So, I read both sites.

    • It amazes me at how often the New York Times is lauded on /. as the standard by which all other news sites should be measured when, frankly, it's nothing special.

      If you want to see how it should be done look at the BBC's news site, news.bbc.co.uk/ [bbc.co.uk], which is available in both UK and world editions. Far less bias, far more coverage, far better analysis. Basically, it makes the NYT site (and most other news sites) look amateur by comparison.

      Looking at the Google News home page right now there are only two articles from the NYT linked to and plenty more from other US media outlets, including the Boston Globe, Miami Herald, SF Chronicle, Seattle Times, International Herald Tribune, USA Today and Fox News. By comparison, there are ten stories that link to the BBC's news site, including the current lead article.

      It's not a scientific analysis but it does indicate that the BBC is perhaps a broader and more widely respected news outlet than the NYT.

      (Here endeth the rant.)
      • I read the BBC news website every day, and I still think the NYT is better.
  • I'm still getting a feel for it. Previously, I've been relying mostly on a customized my.yahoo.com page. (Before that, I used my.excite.com until they clobbered it with the bankruptcy.) I like that Yahoo has local news, so I can get my local paper's headlines. Perhaps Google will eventually get a bunch of local sections set up and let you customize which ones you use, but that would require creating accounts (I would hate to have that much info stored in a cookie, as I would have to recreate it on each computer).

    Anyway, it will be interesting to ask the same question in a month.
    • I think this is pretty cool - I have used yahoo news in the past, but it is much more limited.

      I agree logging in would be messy, but a 3-click (country-state-city) customization process, with the results stored in a cookie, without requiring a login, wouldn't be too difficult for most users.
      My big disappointment - news.google.ca doesn't have a Canada section,and news.google.co.uk doesn't have a UK section.

  • Customizable Front Page (Score:2, Insightful)

    by 1Oman ( 308666 )
    It would be nice if google had a front page along the lines of slashdot the I could customize to display the headlines I am most interested in.

    Also maybe some kind of MORE NEWS link that showed more headlines from the topic I am reading (such as Science and Technology) that listed more of todays stories that are not necessarily the top stories.

    • Also maybe some kind of MORE NEWS link that showed more headlines from the topic I am reading (such as Science and Technology) that listed more of todays stories that are not necessarily the top stories.

      Just click on the "Sci/Tech" label?

  • Slate has an interesting article too. (Score:3, Informative)

    by Utopia ( 149375 ) on Wednesday September 25, 2002 @06:00PM (#4331390)
    Google invents McNews [slate.com]
  • So where does one go to get real content if everyone follows the google model?

    -Sean
  • The way it's organized actually helps me dig deeper more easily on stories that grab me... I can scan for bias across several sources much more readily that way. AND it's a clearinghouse!! Kind of like the Drudge Report, without the disadvantage of having Matt Drudge in charge.
  • For a few years now I've been copying the text of articles into a .txt files, and saving it in a news database, creating my own personal mini-lexis nexus for research purposes, as you never know when a link is going to go dead.
    I don't actually read the stories half the time, just copy the text for later searches. A random smattering of recent stories is just what the doctor ordered half the time, as with most things google, the results of the news searches are, for the most part, highly relevant. Yahoo's searches through AP/reuters never quite did it for me, so it's a welcome edition to my news gathering arsenal.

  • Slashdot Editors Trolling (Score:4, Funny)

    by CokeBear ( 16811 ) on Wednesday September 25, 2002 @06:14PM (#4331519) Journal
    This article is a blatent attempt by the editors of Slashdot to get Google linking recursivly to them. Nice try guys.

  • Lamest line in the article (Score:3)

    by rw2 ( 17419 ) on Wednesday September 25, 2002 @06:31PM (#4331679) Homepage
    Ok, maybe I'm just pissy because Poliglut and slashdot do the same exact thing (re-reporting of news) and slashdot is a google news source while I'm not (and, just for the record, I think neither should be) but...

    The funniest line in that article had to be:
    "What savvy publishers of registration-required sites must do, he says, is work with Google in order to be included in their news searches."

    Er, savvy? Really. How about not completely brain dead. It doesn't require savvy or any other synonym for smart to realize that google is a big site and that, if your goal is hits, you should be listed there.

    Do 'savvy' webmasters register their sites with search engines? No. They are *way* past that 1994 era stumbling block to glory.

    This is no different.

    • Hell, Kuro5hin got added as a news site (even the diaries), so Poliglut should be able to.

      Try emailing news-feedback AT google.com to get your site added. It may not have a high rating, but it will be indexed.

  • I think it's fantastic. I have about 6 sites I regularly view throughout the day (including slashdot and a few science sites). I had, of late, been trying to find other sites that served my surfing style. In particular, sites with headlines that weren't just rehashed news of the other sites I view. Google News is exactly what I was looking for.

    Now I start at google and wander to other sites as needed. The list of news feeds [google.com] to Google doesn't include some of the science sites I enjoy (Nature [nature.com] and New Scientist [newscientist.com]). It might soon as everyone jumps on the Google wagon.
  • Right up until the release announcement, news.google.com was live, had a *great* layout consisting of really simple, single column text with no images or tables, and was even easier to navigate. I loved it.

    Then Google changed things to look like a traditional news site. :-(
  • Shows the results sorted by "date", while this perhaps be fixed, I find it interesting to see when the various news orginizations picked up an article.

    If you change the sort to "relevance" it imediatly folds to a single article.

  • Ongoing experiment (Score:4, Interesting)

    by babbage ( 61057 ) <cdeversNO@SPAMcis.usouthal.edu> on Wednesday September 25, 2002 @06:43PM (#4331806) Homepage Journal
    Honestly, I'd been using news.google.com as my main headlines page for several months now, and was surprised to find, when I woke up & checked my regular morning pages the other day, that the layout had been made much more complicated (because, of course, the site had gone public).

    The previous layout was a whole lot simpler, just a simple list of categories, top stories within each, and four or five links to that story from different sources. One nice touch was that the link for each story was the headline used for it, which was nice because you could tell at a glance who was just repeating a wire feed and who really had something worthwhile -- and sometimes you could get nicely contrasting stories (like, say, the same event in Kashmir as described by both Indian & Pakistani news sources). The new, more complex & busy layout doesn't allow them to do this anymore, which IMO is a change for the worse.

    AS for the new layout, I dunno. It has much higher information density, which the Edward Tufte fan in me thinks is a very good thing. But it's a very busy layout, and so a bit overwhelming to me. I'm finding that I haven't spent as much time on the new version as I was before on the old one, and I'm not checking it as often either -- maybe just a cursory glance once or twice a day, as opposed to a more careful skim several times a day before. Compared to the sparse layouts that Google ordinarily uses, a design this heavy feels very jarring to me, where on another site I probably wouldn't care. Hopefully I'll get over this.

    Here's an interesting angle though, from the article [mediainfo.com] the original submitter noted:

    Google News already has made arrangements with some leading news sites that use registration schemes -- such as The New York Times. Google News users who click on links to NYTimes.com articles at Google News go directly to the article -- there's no intervening registration screen -- even if they're not already registered at NYTimes.com. This works, explains product manager Mayer, because the site allows Google's spiders to crawl its content and include links in the Google service. When a non-registered user hits a NYTimes.com page, the site will recognize that it's a referral from Google News and serve up the content -- delaying the registration requirement for one page. When the Google News user tries to go elsewhere on NYTimes.com, then the registration system kicks in. If the user is already registered, then NYTimes.com reads the user's NYT cookie and doesn't ask for registration information.

    Why can't Slashdot come up with such an arrangment? The NY TImes is one of the best news sources on the 'net, and I'm sure their staff has to have at least some Slashdot fans. The constant whining disclaimers about having to register -- and the even more bizarre constant opposition to the very idea -- could all be short-circuited if the two sites could enter into a similar arrangement. Why has this never happened? Lack of imagination, or is one side or the other just uninterested? Whatever the obstacle has been, I'd be happy if we could just get over it and set up some kind of arrangement.

    • if Slashdot did then Salon would do it and then all of the sudden 90% of NYT's referrers would be registration free and how would that benefit the NYT?
    • In toying with it, it seems like NYT is *not* checking the referring URL, they are putting hash keys in the google URLs and checking on that.

      let the hacking begin!
  • Note that at the bottom of the Google news page it says, "This page was generated entirely by computer algorithms without human editors. No humans were harmed or even used in the creation of this page."
  • The first time I saw google news, it looked interesting. But then as quickly as it came, I stoped liking it. I don't wan't to read all my news in one place. I'd rather have my Opera personal bar with one link for slashdot (tech news), neowin (Windows news), CNN (International News), and The Seattle Times (Local news). I'm sure that lots of people will enjoy the convienence of all their news on one page, but I sometimes feel like one type of news or the other, but rarely all kinds at once.
  • This may be a bit off topic, but it'd be great to have a news service where I could rank each article on a scale of 1-10 in terms of how interested I was in it and whether I'd like to be sent similar news in the future. After a few weeks/months of doing this, my hope is that I would mostly get stuff that interests me. It could throw some occasional new stuff at me over time to see if my preferences have changed.

    Right now I don't subscribe to a newspaper or typically read common news sites because I don't want to wade through tons of stuff that doesn't interest me to find the stuff that does interest me. Slashdot is a partial solution whereby some other group is determining what's interesting whose tastes happen to be somewhat similar to my own, but a news service that adapts to my own personal preferences would be nice. Maybe something like this already exists.

  • I've spent some time getting my slash boxes and setting pretty customized, and now I never go anywhere else for my news. I also really enjoy the communtity, comments, etc. ./ is way better than Google, IMH but accurate O.
  • The folks at google are slacking horribly! They only have 498 /. articles on Google News starting on September 1, 2002. I'm very dissapointed.
  • Here's a quote from the mentioned article "Google News already has made arrangements with some leading news sites that use registration schemes -- such as The New York Times. Google News users who click on links to NYTimes.com articles at Google News go directly to the article -- there's no intervening registration screen -- even if they're not already registered at NYTimes.com. This works, explains product manager Mayer, because the site allows Google's spiders to crawl its content and include links in the Google service. When a non-registered user hits a NYTimes.com page, the site will recognize that it's a referral from Google News and serve up the content -- delaying the registration requirement for one page. When the Google News user tries to go elsewhere on NYTimes.com, then the registration system kicks in. If the user is already registered, then NYTimes.com reads the user's NYT cookie and doesn't ask for registration information." Which of course means that now I can read all the ones mentioned in ./ without registering!! I propose that it now be a requirement that all links to the NYT be through Google. Just my($.02);
    • This partner arrangement has already been available for a while through AltaVista--not that anyone uses that search engine for anything, mind you. Take a look here [altavista.com]. You can get to the NYT articles at the top without registering because of the PARTNER=ALTAVISTA1 at the end of the URL (and some of the garbage before it).

      Of course no one really new about this because no one uses AltaVista anymore (at least not their news area). The only reason I knew about it was because Matt Drudge occasionally uses links from there on his page.

      And, I guess with Google News you can get any NYT article without registering.

  • give us a while to get to use google news. it was just introduced three days ago. we're not all used to it, we're still feeling it out, we're still seeing if it suits our needs, etc. in other words, it's pre-mature to start asking questions like "how has it changed your surfing habits?"

    if you want to know for sure, try asking again in a month or two. people by then will have formed more solid opinions and habits of the site to get a more authoritative answer.
  • Slashdot: A Google 4000 News Site.
  • FoxNews.com page rank = -2

  • brings a tear to my eye (Score:2, Insightful)

    by MrBlic ( 27241 )
    google news really makes me feel like I have an even better feel for what is happening in the world than I would have if I visited my usual dozen news sites. (cnn, nytimes, washington post, bbc, new scientist, burligton, vt free press, champlain channel, etc.)

    At the moment, the sci-tech section shows: National Geographic subliminal tree in a zen garden and Slashdot apple open-sourcing Rendezvous. Tony blair has the headline, and the world section has a story on the ivory coast that I really appreciate that is just the kind of story that I wouldn't see on american news, but would show up on the news overseas.

    I love how often it's updated. I can visit it a few times an hour, and it has a great ballance of important stories staying, and fluffy, but interesting stories passing through.

    My only wish is that it had a nytimes - style NASDAQ graph or some other indicator of the financial news.

    -Jim
    • And another thing! Try doing a search on the google news page!

      You get news stories sorted by relevance or date (more recent is usually more relavent anyay).

      Searching for my home town (tiny Hinesburg Vermont) shows me what local businesses have been news-worthy recently.

      Searching for manrijuana shows how many protests, busts, and crop damage has happened in the last few days.

      Searching for 'Python' (I use the scripting language) shows me that around the world, there have been several dogs, two deer, a cheeta, and goat eaten by pythons. The ones that ate the deer died. So did the deer.

      I don't know anywhere else I can search for current events on the web. I'm adicted.

      -Jim

  • Google has a clue (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Raetsel ( 34442 ) on Wednesday September 25, 2002 @09:10PM (#4332944)

    That's why I go there -- and have for a long time. Google is what CNN used to be... for me, at least.

    The best part of it is that the content comes from a much more diverse set of sources than I'd ever be willing to surf on my own. I'd like to see a full list of the sites they're crawling, but I've been happy with their results so far.

    • CNN has become progressively worse. It used to be a large page of stories, and I could find out what was going on in the world in a single page load. Now things are down to (something like) two links per catgory, and you have to dig to find your news.

    • MSNBC has stuck with their layout (to their credit), but there's all those menues (or interstitial ads) to deal with -- ick.

    • Salon is a giant editorial page, not news. I'm not even going to comment on their in-your-face ads (oops, I just did...)

    • Fox News, ABC, USA Today -- I never had any desire to read their sites for some reason.

    • Newspaper sites are often too regional (local papers), or require registration (NY Times, Washington Post), so I just didn't read 'em. They'll learn eventually that registration = less readership = less banner ad revenue. Give 'em time, the clue will come.

    • NPR is nice, but usually rather thin on the news. I go there to stream audio, not read stories.
    The only thing that would make Google News better would be a "Fringe" category -- but I get my weekly dose of that at News of the Weird. [newsoftheweird.com]
  • I am a notoriously bad speller. Only slightly lesser well known is that you shouldn't trust a slashdot editor in asia^W^W to proof your stories. Well I am looking right now at at google news and I can see the apple/rendezvous slashdot artical as we speak which shows that slashdot is most deffinetly being used as a source. Maybe its time that the slash editors to use a spell checker and a grammer checker since the site will be getting a little more traffic.

    No spellcheckers were used in the production of this post to illustrate a point.

  • Interested but won't (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Viqsi ( 534904 )
    Google News looks pretty nice. Normally I wouldn't have a problem with it.

    But they've got a meta refresh tag in there so that the page continually reloads, and I have absolutely zero tolerance for any site that does that, so I don't plan on making it a regular stop for me unless they take it off.

    (Yes, I've already sent email to news-feedback about it)
  • You've got to admire the playfulness of a company that uses this disclaimer at the bottom of the page:
    This page was generated entirely by computer algorithms without human editors.

    No humans were harmed or even used in the creation of this page.
  • This is the BBC [bbc.co.uk]

    Love it or hate it, the BBC is the best source of news in the world.
  • I've been using Google as my only search engine and directory since it's first year being open. And I've been using (and scraping!) the BETA of the news search for, what, has it been like 9 months?

    But this final BETA looks great and that disclaimer at the bottom that some of you have already mentioned is pretty funny.

  • I always start my daily (minimum) 2 hour news read with /. and Todays Papers on Slate.com, a summary of several of the top American Dailies. Both excellent jumping off points for the morning.

  • After using it for my regular news bites, I decided to type in the names of some of my favorite bands who are touring right now. Pretty cool that it scours the globe and comes up with even a slight mention of them. Often when a band goes to a town the local paper, which I would have no way of knowing the name without hunting for it, may do a write-up or an interview, and now those are easily found. I even found little things like a slight mention of a birthday, or an interview with another person, who might mention the name of someone else. Pretty darn cool.

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