
Google News Initiative - artsandsci
https://newsinitiative.withgoogle.com/
======
inetknght
I used Google News for a long time. I have since blackholed it on all of my
machines. By tailoring the news articles presented to be based on the
interests that Google data mined from my Google profile, it became an echo
chamber even worse than Facebook.

It became a very _bad_ source of news: all of the articles were self-
reinforcing each other with very _very_ little actual diversity of sources.

~~~
jacksmith21006
Could not disagree more. I am generally pretty liberal but get news stories
from Breitbart, Fox news, etc all the time in my feed.

I like to read all sides so love this aspect of Google news. Heck I get
negative Google stories from Google. Can't ask for more neutral.

~~~
Bartweiss
Is there some feedback feature or something you use to get a helpful range of
stories?

My experience with Google News isn't so much bias or a bubble as
_uselessness_. Source quality, comprehensiveness, and coverage depth seem
totally irrelevant, like I'm just getting a feed of every news site a bunch of
people clicked on recently. It's the same stuff as Facebook's trending bar, at
about the same level of shallow and unfocused.

And occasionally, it seems like a major story is incompatible with my profile,
or has a keyword collision with other topics, or _something_ , and so
disappears almost completely.

I tried Google News and Google Now with real eagerness, but my experience with
both of them was just shockingly low quality.

~~~
Moto7451
You can weigh your news sources. I intentionally give a little more weight to
sources I don’t always agree with but aren’t obviously biased. Things like
fake news spreaders, conspiracy theorist, government propaganda machines, or
fair topical sites that simply don’t interest me (mostly Celebrity News and
Gossip) get black holed.

You can find those sliders in your settings. Also they ask you periodically on
the desktop homepage.

Pro tip: if you hate the mobile or new UI as much as I do, set your user agent
to iPhone and go to google.com/nwshp. For whatever reason that magical
incantation gives you the classic home page (with the sliders I mentioned in
easy access/obvious places). I’ll be really excited if someone knows how to
just set that globally in settings. I haven’t found it.

~~~
joecool1029
>You can weigh your news sources.

Neat site that does it for you:
[https://www.allsides.com/](https://www.allsides.com/)

~~~
vesrah
Thank you for this, hadn't run across a site as well presented as this.

------
zoul
As someone who runs a regional newspaper, I very much doubt that the future of
healthy journalism is in the hands of a big company such as Google. We are
already thinking hard what to do with the Facebook monopoly, we would be crazy
to voluntarily stick our neck into another one.

~~~
awakeasleep
First, I'm the type of person that thinks the concentration of power from
monopolies could be the most pressing issue facing the USA--

But can you explain how having another choice is dangerous? It seems like it'd
be a gasp of air in the face of facebook's suffocating presence.

~~~
smacktoward
The hens in the hen-house can be forgiven for not being excited that there are
two wolves outside now instead of one.

------
kyrra
EDIT: It looks like there were 3 blog posts by Google announcing this
initiative.

Blog posts announcing Google News Initative:
[https://www.blog.google/topics/google-news-
initiative/announ...](https://www.blog.google/topics/google-news-
initiative/announcing-google-news-initiative/)

Subscription payments feature: [https://www.blog.google/topics/google-news-
initiative/introd...](https://www.blog.google/topics/google-news-
initiative/introducing-subscribe-google/)

Elevating quality journalism: [https://www.blog.google/topics/google-news-
initiative/elevat...](https://www.blog.google/topics/google-news-
initiative/elevating-quality-journalism/)

Some news coverage on it: [https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/20/17142788/google-
news-init...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/20/17142788/google-news-
initiative-fake-news-journalist-subscriptions)

~~~
kosei
Based on the blog article, it seems like the main thing they're trying to
solve is the payment system (use Google payment to easily subscribe). If
that's true, it's a much different and less exciting offer than the OP's
linked page which seemed like a much larger initiative.

~~~
danso
The subscription system sounds like it's one part of this initiative. And if
it is indeed the "main thing" then I think we should give Google some credit
for being serious with this initiative. A payments system is a boring problem
but it is the one most core to news organizations' current existential
problems. It's not as sexy as using NLP to categorize news archives perhaps,
but it's the most important to news orgs' survival.

~~~
wnissen
I just wish they would bring back the old patron system, where I didn't see
ads and some small amount of money went to the sites I visited, without a
subscription. Because I want to support good journalism, wherever it is found,
but there's no way I'm ever going to sign up for $3/mo for the Miami Herald to
read three articles a year.

~~~
jacques_chester
You're thinking of Google Contributor. It seems likely that these are teams
working in different parts of Google.

------
kingnight
Sadly, Google is also sitting on a HUGE amount of archival newspaper in a
completely unsearchable state.

They've OCR'd thousands of historical papers but the search is completely
broken.

[https://news.google.com/newspapers](https://news.google.com/newspapers)

It's a pretty incredible resource if you know the date/place of an event but
if you wanted to research a little more broad it's a tool with incredibly
untapped potential.

I wish they would spend more time providing tools for people to consume
information in powerful ways rather than trying to 'tailor' experiences.

~~~
kolpa
What specifically is broken? Basic keyword search seems to work.

~~~
make3
keyword search is the very bare minimum for search

~~~
fooker
Any search at google is N mapreduce jobs away from a keyword search.

In theory, having a really nice search engine for this news would be rather
easy for Google (/any Googler with a few weeks of time and access to this
data).

This is essentially what every new employee at Google has to do in the
orientation week.

------
sterban
I got fed up with Google News a year or so ago, over the echo chamber that the
news site has become. It motivated me to create
[https://statesreport.com](https://statesreport.com), with no ads and no
tracking.

~~~
scottybowl
Are you open to creating an API for us to query for
[https://www.chooseholly.com](https://www.chooseholly.com)? We currently pull
data from Bings API for our Discover feature.

Happy to pay for usage :)

~~~
e15ctr0n
Just checked out your site - nice! Interesting to hear about your Discover
feature. What does it do exactly?

------
lgleason
Given the bias inside of Google and the fact they have already demonstrated
that they are not a neutral arbitrator, the last thing I want to have is them
being the arbitrator of who or what news is seen. This is more of an attempt
to consolidate their power, what you can and cannot see etc.. Hard pass.

~~~
jacksmith21006
Bias? Google is now paying the infrastructure cost for channels like Alex
Jones as no advertisers to generate revenues for Google.

But in the name of free speech Google allows on YouTube and foots the bill.
What could be more unbias?

~~~
simula67
Google has fact checked a claim that was not made in right leaning Daily
Caller website : [http://dailycaller.com/2018/01/09/googles-new-fact-check-
fea...](http://dailycaller.com/2018/01/09/googles-new-fact-check-feature-
almost-exclusively-targets-conservative-sites/)

Although it may be bugs and not bias : [https://www.poynter.org/news/blame-
bugs-not-partisanship-goo...](https://www.poynter.org/news/blame-bugs-not-
partisanship-google-wrongly-appending-fact-check-daily-caller)

Google continuing to host Alex Jones may not be be 'in the name of free
speech', they may not want people to go to other platforms to get their
content. They can lead users to other videos from any video ( using the side
bar ) and make money from those videos which does contain advertisements

~~~
jacksmith21006
There is really not competition for Google with YouTube plus they now have
over 1.6 billion hours consumed a day. So getting rid of Alex Jones content do
not think would hurt YT in any manner.

Google does not have to play the cost for more left leaning content like they
have to do with alt right content.

~~~
simula67
> There is really not competition for Google with YouTube plus they now have
> over 1.6 billion hours consumed a day. So getting rid of Alex Jones content
> do not think would hurt YT in any manner.

Current dominance != future dominance. Read the concept behind innovators
dilemma

Also youtube has stiff competition from Facebook :
[https://www.google.co.in/amp/s/mashable.com/2017/12/05/how-f...](https://www.google.co.in/amp/s/mashable.com/2017/12/05/how-
facebook-watch-will-overtake-youtube-as-biggest-video-platform.amp)

~~~
jacksmith21006
Have read innovators dilemma. There is little chance for YT to be distrubted
at this point.

The problem for a competitor is YT was built during a period of time it was
possible, barely, to do this. I say barely as in Google had a ton of
engineering challenges.

Not sure if technical but serving over 1.6 billion hours of video a day is
really hard.

But now with all the content in one place it is impossible to compete.

Wife and me talking about Marsha getting hit with a football. Just turn around
and ask the Google Home to play it and it plays a video of the scene. Same
with Mary laughing at clowns funeral.

------
mitko
Google and traditional media as well are in the business of selling
advertisement. I feel that when your money comes from selling your readers
attention to the highest ad bidder, one incentive becomes to sensationalize
and do other tricks to increase viewership. This incentive can be at odds with
the incentive to inform truthfully and completely, as some of the important
information would invariably be boring, resulting in less sales. I've
experienced this at Twitter as we optimized the product for engagement.

I hypothesize that this incentive to lock-in reader groups, has led to
fragmentation of media and creating a lot of "info bubbles", or "interest
based magazines". I think this is exacerbated by the dropping cost of
information ( I have some thoughts on the process at
[http://dimitarsimeonov.com/2017/10/27/the-shifting-sweet-
spo...](http://dimitarsimeonov.com/2017/10/27/the-shifting-sweet-spot-for-
media) )

I don't believe it is in Google's _strongest_ interest to provide truthful
media, as Google doesn't make it's money from telling you truth.

I am optimist though.. and think in the future we'll have journalist's job be
to aggregate a lot of that narrative and collect some micro-payments. And
we'll have a lot fewer journalists, as there is less money in making these
narratives.

~~~
Clanan
A huge consequence of the prioritization of clicks is the loss of quality
reporting. Those shuttered newspapers who went the way of the dinosaurs
carried with them hundreds of years of journalistic experience. A lot of it
didn't transfer to modern news sites. Now we're paying the price with young,
inexperienced "journalists" pumping out junk articles with poor sourcing,
missing or wrong facts, etc. I can't find it now but one of the better modern
journalists (Glenn Greenwald or Bob Woodward maybe?) had a great piece on
this. He lamented how mainstream media is failing to maintain their
journalistic standards because they're too biased and they haven't been taught
how to be good journalists.

I think Google should focus heavily on this, but their PR doesn't mention it
much. Quality journalists first, then quality tools.

------
olivermarks
'journalism' and 'news' are obsolete concepts.

A journalist was an employee of a large entity who wrote articles and made
videos that complied with the reality and perspective the company they work
for wanted to promote. (There are still a few of these employees left working
for what's left of these entities)

'News' was selective packaged information to influence and inform the broadest
reach, with a goal of selling accompanying advertising messaging based on that
reach.

~~~
mtreis86
Newspapers existed long before advertising. The goal was to inform, and to
have a public place of record accessible to all.

~~~
notriddle
Yeah, because they were funded by the governments they ran under. "News" is a
polite word for "propaganda," always was, always will be.

------
jfaucett
All I want is a resource like "google" for all newspaper articles ever that we
have stored anywhere.

Whenever I'm studying a topic, I'll often look up very old or contemporary
newspaper writings to see how our perceptions and attitudes regarding the
issue have changed over time.

I did this with the civil war and slavery at one point and recently with
artificial intelligence. I would highly recommend it for comparing and
contrasting your current perspective on a historical event or issue with that
time's perspective of the same event or past times' perspectives on that same
issue. Its really interesting too to see how the modern perspective is formed
slowly over the years up to the current day.

~~~
Ivoirians
Someone else pointed that this exists and, surprise, it's run by Google:
[https://news.google.com/newspapers](https://news.google.com/newspapers)

There are other newspaper archive services though.

------
evolve2k
"The future of journalism depends on all of us working together."

Translation:

"Your future as a new organization depends on you working well with us here at
Google and finding ways for us to quietly tax part of your prior earnings"

------
mudil
The real problem that Google doesn't want to talk about is its monopoly (with
FB) of the digital ad market, to the tune of something like 85% of the total
market. As a result, from big to small publishers, specialty publishers,
regional publications, etc are all struggling. Here's a read:
[https://www.medgadget.com/2018/03/google-serfdom-
publishing-...](https://www.medgadget.com/2018/03/google-serfdom-publishing-
digital-age.html)

~~~
IAmEveryone
How exactly can two competing companies share a monopoly?

~~~
mudil
Duopoly, to be precise

~~~
IAmEveryone
Plus, of course, those other 15% of the market, to be even more precise. Not
to mention that online advertisement to a certain degree is the same market as
other forms of advertisement.

~~~
mudil
Look, there is a reason there are active investigations of Google's and FB's
effects on the news media in U.K., Australia, Korea. They are duopoly and
their effects reverberate through the entire internet, stifling creation of
new websites and new media sources. There's a reason that VC investment in
news media on the internet is nonexistent.

------
ibdf
I bet you they are going to push AMP plus their Newstand App which sucks. The
Newstand app is great for finding news., but not great for reading cause AMP
butchers the content so often I ended up clicking on "view in browser" all the
time. and dare you try to copy and paste text!

------
mojuba
Why is Google putting $300 million of their own money into this?

Does anyone have greater than zero trust in what Google is trying to do in
this space?

~~~
jacksmith21006
Can't think of anyone I would trust more. Can you? Who?

Google allowing video on YouTube they can't monetize kind of saids it all
about Google and free speech.

~~~
wtetzner
> Google allowing video on YouTube they can't monetize kind of saids it all
> about Google and free speech.

Huh? You mean video that doesn't contain ads? If those videos attract users to
YouTube, then those users are more likely to start watching some videos that
_do_ contain ads. Seems pretty straight forward, and says basically nothing
about whether or not Google can be trusted.

------
peterwwillis
_" The future of journalism depends on all of us working together."_

Actually the future of journalism depends on media companies to stop working
like tabloids trying to attract eyeballs to shiny controversial crap.

Seriously, I've had to turn off every Breaking News alert and e-mail that I
have because 9 times out of 10 it's something stupid or scandalous relating to
Trump. Scandal or "shocking political developments" are not breaking news,
especially when they happen every day. It's not world news, it's not national
news, it's not local news. It's gossip about a reality TV star.

This isn't journalism, this is the slow eroding of my sanity during time which
I should be getting to know what the weather will be like tomorrow, whether an
important referendum is coming up, actually important world events that impact
real people, or significant changes to a local, national or global economic
center, not to mention important scientific advances, and of course, sports
news.

Real breaking news would be "a 7.5 earthquake leveled Mexico City today",
"ethnic minorities in east asia continue to be massacred by their government
who is denying the charges", "new tax laws will provide cuts to the richest",
"the federal government is cracking down on states' push back to their anti-
immigration and drug laws", etc. These are important things that are happening
today that might affect me, my loved ones, my livelihood, etc. I don't give a
shit what the special counsel has recently said about a person tangentially
related to a controversy surrounding a political figure.

How about Google start an initiative to relay important, substantive, fact-
based information to people that need it? Was that too much to put in their
mission statement? I mean, they're only one of the most powerful technology
companies on the planet employing the smartest engineers on the planet. Maybe
they could get Google X to take a look at it.

------
martin1975
I don't have a problem with 'truth' per se, merely a problem with who gets to
adjudicate what is true versus what is not, even if something is apparently
non-true.

Rather than delete or abridge any legal content (as defined by a litany of 1st
Amendment SCOTUS cases), at least in the USA, instead of
deleting/modifying/filtering news content, we should do with news content what
we've done with movies' rating labels for as long as we have - tag the content
with a 'truth' label.

So Google News can develop a tagging system that labels news articles as "most
likely" to "least likely" to be true, like a 1-10 rating. HuffPo can have its
own truth ratings for the content they push. Breitbart or Infowars their own,
etc.

I'll go for a system like this any day over Google or the SPLC or CNN or
Snopes or whomever crowning themselves "truth" endorses, when in fact, they're
mostly spinning the facts and telling a story from their own POV/context.

------
mkj
I like Google News to browse, but their forced news-on-every-android-chrome-
new-tab is the reason I've uninstalled Chrome and gone to Firefox. I was
surprised, Android Firefox is actually a pretty competitive browser these
days!

Hooray anti-competitive cross-subsidies.

(edit: I tend to block cookies on desktop so I guess they don't have too much
profile to tailor news)

------
amoorthy
While this is generally a positive step by Google it will fall short in
revitalizing the news industry for a simple reason. In a world of near
infinite content options, most people can no longer justify having any single
news subscription.

A better solution is a fractional subscription model where subscriptions are
tiered to one's reading needs. This is what my company
[http://CivikOwl.com](http://CivikOwl.com) is working on. Hope to make a
positive contribution to this important issue facing society.

~~~
jacques_chester
I generally agree with the model; it's a model that's been independently
struck on many times now. Most directly in the hunt are Google and Flattr.

I had the same idea some time ago, but silly me, got interested in solving the
technical problems of tracking visits while preserving privacy. What I
_should_ have been doing is fretting about the business side of things.

At least I got a patent out of it.

------
Jeff_Brown
The solution I wish for is one in which the knowledge graph generating users'
news feeds is opened to users. Rather than hoping that an aggregator platform
will pick what they need to read, a user ought to be able to ask questions
like, "Show me articles arguing _", or, "Show me articles that contradict this
one," or, "Show me articles about [topic] which users have labeled clarifying
(or any synonym of clarifying)."

------
ksk
Is there a page that actually explains what this is? The linked to page seems
to be devoid of any actual content. Is Google going to be covering the crazy
costs involved in sending journalists all over the world, keeping them safe,
doing investigative journalism (very little of which is happening now anyway),
etc. My cynicism aside, its nice to see a tech company atleast try to help
find a way to fund journalism in the future.

------
wuliwong
I think my issue with this is that google has all lots of special interests. I
believe a true, functional solution most likely needs to come from a new
company. A company that can build its reputation on surfacing "quality" news
but without any particular bias or agenda. I'm not sure how any already large
corporation would ever be able to win my confidence to act in this way.

------
antirez
Meanwhile Google Now Italian version is full of garbage that I signal for a
long time, and nobody cares about removing it...

------
bootlooped
Part of this is a method to make subscribing easier. I would prefer if there
were a ubiquitous and easy way to make micro-payments for news articles. I
consume news from way more sources than I am willing to subscribe to.

------
pasbesoin
Ok, I guess I'll try to read this.

However, this comment won't wait:

If you were "with" the news, you wouldn't have done things like kill Google
Reader, a primary vehicle power users used to process the news.

Stop prescribing. Start listening.

------
cromwellian
Sigh, reading the headline, it wouldn't take a machine learning model to
predict the sentiment of the responses.

HackerNews is pretty much turning into an echo chamber itself around news.
Pretty much every announcement is greeted with intense negativity, less
discussion of facts, or other solutions. And I'm not just talking about tech
companies, even the release of a new language, framework, or tool is often
accompanied by excessive negativity.

If you don't want news to make money via ads, and you don't like systems to
encourage subscriptions, and you don't like paywalls, than pretty much you
need public funding of news by the state like NPR/PBS/BBC to make news a non-
profit.

So I propose the following: A national 3% tax on all internet connections:
mobile phone bill, cable, etc. The revenue for this to be paid to
PBS/NPR/VOA/other public news orgs.

------
koverda
Not really related - but why does this page have a ton of these absolutely
massive images? It's a 34.1MB monster of a page.

------
howenterprisey
What's the point of the withgoogle.com domain?

~~~
advisedwang
google.com is a valuable target for XSS attacks. Keeping content off this
domain reduces the attack surface.

~~~
adtac
I too think this is the reason. It does, however, allow for cool domains like
[https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com](https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com)

------
cryoshon
anyone else notice how all of the examples they chose are distinctly NOT
current events, contentious issues, or anything where there might be a serious
dispute over what constitutes the basic facts of the situation?

i'm going to join other commenters here and say hard pass.

google has too much power already, and they aren't particularly responsible
stewards of the public trust. and it seems like they haven't even solved any
problems with their new product...

------
daxaxelrod
Is the css showing a 404 for anyone else?

~~~
thisisit
CSS is showing 404 for me too.

------
dicroce
You know what would actually be welcome? Some way to tell real from fake news.
Get to work on that, Google.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
They’re just working on solving the halting problem, then they’ll get right on
it.

------
roycifer
the real news is they forgot to optimize the images on that site!

------
BastardGas
Why can't Google News be searched by date? It used to have that feature but
they took it away. I wonder why!

------
daodedickinson
The SPLC is part of YouTube’s “Trusted Flaggers” program, yet Google News
supports Farrakhan's The Final Call, even though the SPLC lists Nation of
Islam as a hate group.

I won't link the rant about the Jews controlling the FBI, but check out this
"news" brought to me courtesy of Google:

"Did the Honorable Elijah Muhammad know of the mathematics in the writings of
the scriptures before Doctor Khalifa, and others, did? Not only did he, but he
demonstrated that he was brought into the under­stand­ing of far deeper
mathematical truths, which produced, correlated and in­terlocked all aspects
of reality—including all of the problems of human­ity—by Almighty God Himself.
He was taught the very root of all mathe­matics. This root is in the brain, or
mind, of the human being. God taught and brought him into the very nature of
the movement of the mind of Him, Who originally conceived of all of that which
we call “universe” and Who produced the human mind. Allah taught him the root
of math­ematics—which ultimately resides in the core of the mind of God
Him­self."

[https://news.google.com/news/search/section/q/%22There%20is%...](https://news.google.com/news/search/section/q/%22There%20is%20no%20question%20that%20the%20use%20of%20the%20scriptures%2C%20by%20the%20Honorable%20Elijah%20Muhammad%2C%20is%20still%20very%20relevant%22/%22There%20is%20no%20question%20that%20the%20use%20of%20the%20scriptures%2C%20by%20the%20Honorable%20Elijah%20Muhammad%2C%20is%20still%20very%20relevant%22?hl=en&gl=US&ned=us)

~~~
nugi
Slpc still thinks Pepe is a hate symbol and juggalos are gangsters. You don't
have to dig down into scripture interpretation to see they have bias issues.
Remove refrences to islam, jews, and religion, and focus on why the group is
unreliable if you want to engage with most people.

