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Google Should Tell Us How They Pick Sources
Wouldn't it be reasonable to ask Google to publish the criteria they use to vet potential news sources? We can be sure potential sources are vetted by someone at Google, whether by a review committe or, one level removed, by developers implementing selection algorithms. My assumption is that they make a case-by-case decision on each submitted site, pretty much like any newsroom editor has always done. If they are weeding out blogs, or other sources, based on some technical attribute, that's their selection code talking. Personally, I'd like to see more, not less, evidence of human review in Google's news selection. Typically, Google News links each story to hundreds or thousands of sources. There are not hundreds or thousands of original reports on a given story. Almost all of them will be simple pickups and light rewrites of agency reports. Nor do we know why a headline from a given source floats to the top of a story block. As for blogs, I fear that wholesale unfiltered inclusion of every blog that purports to be a news site would simply annoy readers with even more duplicative links all pointing to the same story. I'd appreciate a little more flesh-and-blood effort to weed out the rubbish, so I don't have to.
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