Dan Gillmor is making absurd comments on Google News’ creator Krishna Bharat’s statement that Google News has no view point. He points to an article in the Register which calls Krishna as BharatBot and claims that this is like saying the cat ate my homework.
The register article just complains about the fact that Google News indexes Press Releases (but still tags them). It then goes on to complain that Krishna gives the same reply about the working of Google News. I don’t understand this. If a certain program works a certain way, what are you supposed to do ? Change you answer each time ?
For all the technology news Dan has been covering I don’t think he understands programming and seems to have really liked the Register’s arguments. A program is written using an algorithm. So as Dan says, it could have its programming mistakes sometimes resulting in pictures from some other story appearing in an unrelated news section. But how news gets ranked would depend on the incoming data and not on manual intervention.
If there are more stories on John Kerry, it would get priority than say George Bush. Sometimes when there is a cricket match in India and all English newspapers there report it, that becomes front page news on Google News even though rest of the world has nothing to do with it.
It all depends on the data. That’s what Bharat was trying to say.
Dan Gillmor doesn't get it
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