J.D. Lassica has an excellent article on the Google News search algorithms and how they appear to be a bit shy of unbiased in many cases. J.D. goes on to wonder how this could be, it is after all a computer…isn't it?
Despite those predictable flaws, it's been puzzling to read Google News' takes on John Kerry and George W. Bush over the past month. On Aug. 24, for example, users who clicked on the "John Kerry" link under Google News' In the News heading were treated on the first page of 100 search results to these headlines, among others:
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Useless-Knowledge.com: John Kerry Said “Bring It On”, Now Whines To Bush To Stop The Ads
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Enter Stage Right: The imploding John Kerry
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BushCountry: Americans May Be Stupid, But Not THAT Stupid
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Intellectual Conservative: Why James Rassmann Is Honestly Mistaken About John Kerry Saving His Life
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RushLimbaugh.com: Who’s the Cowboy Now?
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Frontpagemag.com: John Kerry’s Puzzling Silver Star Citations
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Useless-Knowledge.com: John Kerry’s Resume (Part V) At Worst, Treasonous Behavior
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Michnews.com: Swift Boat Veterans for Truth Expose John Kerry’s Lies
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WorldNetDaily: Krazy John Kerry
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MensNewsDaily.com: John Kerry is Definitely “Unfit for Command”Michnews.com: I’m John Kerry And I Approve This Flip-FlopUseless-Knowledge.com: John Kerry Just Can’t Stand The Heat
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Far from an isolated example, the pattern has repeated itself throughout the past month. Small conservative Web sites such as Useless-Knowledge, Men’s News Daily, Michnews and ChronWatch turn up in disproportionate numbers when clicking on news about John Kerry. Useless-Knowledge, for instance, made up 12 of the first 100 results for John Kerry on Friday, and 11 of the first 100 results Saturday.
A phone interview with Krishna Bharat, chief scientist for Google News revealed that the algorithms favor longer, more verbose pieces with more mentions of the keyword rather than those that are shorter.
The ranking and prominence of stories are based on several factors: How many publications are writing about a topic; how recent the articles are; the size of the story, with substantive pieces ranking higher than short items; and the frequency of the search term within the article. The computer algorithms, he said, “are trying to understand how hot and how big the story is.”
So basically, if you want to get your article ranked near the top, just write some blithering rant about whatever news you feel like opining about, and more then likely you’ll head straight to the top of the list. Sounds like we need a bit more human intervention here because it seems that the conservatives are writing nice long bashing Kerry articles and nice long Bush love fests. Not good…Not good at all. As J.D. puts it…
What’s going on? Have Google’s search results been hijacked by Fox News?
1. The top 5 results for a search for George Bush:
-How George Bush made Abu Ghraib a US brand
-Why Vote FOR John Kerry and AGAINST George Bush
-(The next 3 link to dailykos, a very liberal anti-Bush website)
In fact, the first 2 pages of links all portray Bush in a negative way, except one link on the second page to a fairly neutral article about Kerry and Bush. With a search for John Kerry, I see a few pro-Kerry articles mixed in with the anti-Kerry
Posted at 4:38AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Jensen