
How does one appear in the Google News carousel? - owenwil
https://char.gd/blog/2019/google-news-is-broken
======
jondubois
This is scary because it translates to not just centralization of news sources
but also centralization of power and wealth in general. Big news publishers
get their money mostly from corporations.

I think I prefer to live in a world with fake news than one where the elites
curate everything we learn.

The world has always had conmen, charlatans, snake-oil salesmen and fake news;
in small quantities, they are essential to make sure that people keep
questioning everything.

Fake news is like a vaccine which protects us against a zombie apocalypse.
Most news cannot be scientifically proven to be true; so it doesn't make sense
that we should all believe it just because it's popular. Popular news sources
are more likely to be true but they are also a lot more dangerous if they're
not. Given enough time, these big news sources will be corrupted.

~~~
pjc50
Fake news _is_ the zombie apocalypse. It's cheaper to produce than real news,
and so there's likely to be much more of it drowning out the real news. It's
also useful to corrupt people's belief in the possibility of getting accurate
news. The public retreat to partisan news sources if there is no source in the
middle that can be trusted. The quality of decision-making goes down and it
becomes easier for real corruption to flourish once _everyone_ is accused of
corruption by fake news.

~~~
jondubois
>> It's also useful to corrupt people's belief in the possibility of getting
accurate news

That's the point. Accurate, impartial news does not exist and there is no
benefit for the majority of individuals to believe that such a thing exists.
All news is fake to some extent because there is always room for an agenda.
The only reliable way to stop elites from setting the agenda is for people to
believe in stuff which conflicts with the agenda. Whether it's fake news or
not is a detail which doesn't matter.

People should be encouraged to trust their intuition even if it occasionally
leads them to make mistakes.

~~~
ace_of_spades
I am really confused by the use of “elites” in recent times. What is actually
meant by the term? Am I an elite if I have finished my PhD? Do I need to be in
the 0.1%? It’s such a broad term that it basically becomes useless as it means
totally different things to different people...

From my perspective I am not really afraid of elites per se but false
information (or lying people) spreading which enables unsocial and unethical
behavior not only to continue but to thrive.

You can compare humanity to a human body... what you are describing is an
auto-immune disease where your own anti-bodies are attacking your own body...
just because there are cells which are “higher up in the nevous system and
decide what the body should do”?

If the cells are working healthily in your interest, let them be... if they
are misfunctioning and causing harm, by any means, try to replace them.
Throwing around with general terms is not helping anyone in this situation.

~~~
pooiurh
"Elites" means people that are actually competent at their chosen profession.
So real journalists, politicians and the like.

------
bduerst
\- Like SEO, the rules for ranking are obfuscated to prevent gaming (to a
degree).

\- Unlike SEO, the 'news' association for publishers comes with a standard of
authority.

Imagine if it took ten minutes for OP to get their site listed and showing
articles on the headline carousel. Now imagine how easy that same process
would be for the waves of fake news blogs to spread misinformation. It's far
from perfect but the process is not that quick and not that easy for newcomers
for a reason.

~~~
apatters
The organic search results have also been tweaked over the years to put a
greater emphasis on domain "authority." Google SERPs are a very different
animal than they were 5 or 10 years ago -- back then there was a greater
emphasis on keyword relevancy. Nowadays, you get stuff that doesn't match your
search very well, but it comes from a domain that is popular, old, has lots of
links, and maybe has a little bit of secret Google blessing because it's a big
brand...

People commonly lament that the Web has changed, it's dominated by big brands,
it's not weird anymore, etc. I think this is a big part. Google has made these
changes in an effort to address some legitimate problems around spam,
black/gray hat SEO etc. But they likely have some less user-centric incentives
as well ($$$) and either way, Google SERPs have become more boring and less
relevant.

There might be an opportunity for disruption emerging because of this. Google
knows its search engine isn't very good anymore! That is why they're
increasingly trying to pitch their service as a recommendation engine with
special AI sauce, not an index of the Web. But frankly as this article
demonstrates, what Google wants to recommend comes from a smaller sandbox and
often is not the most interesting stuff out there.

If someone can come up with a distribution mechanism which solves the problem
of helping the user discover _All The Content_ minus the spammers, scammers
and fake news, they will be able to deliver more relevant information than
search or social media can today. Google being large actually gives them an
in-built disadvantage here because no matter what algorithm they develop, it's
going to be everyone's first priority to reverse engineer and game.

~~~
searchanon
Hi there! Search Quality engineer here (though I don’t actually work on the
core ranking myself, know very little about the specifics of its evolution
over the years, and am nowhere near the news team). Every change we launch to
search (and there are a lot) has very stringent requirements to meet. We have
to, first and foremost, improve things for our users. That means a radical
focus on improving the relevance, quality, and accuracy with which Google
responds to your query. We measure this in a lot of ways. We relentlessly
evaluate every change based on live traffic experiments (in which our metrics
continuously evolve alongside our understanding of how to measure a good
experience for our users) and side-by-side comparisons of queries with and
without the change by real humans (trained to evaluate things with an eye
towards the ideal results page). In every way we can measure, our search
engine is the best it’s ever been. We definitely aren’t perfect; edge cases at
scale are a never-ceasing job, and core improvements to the experience of
searching on google always show that there’s plenty of headroom to improve
what we return to users. But I heartily push back against both of these
statements:

> Google knows its search engine isn't very good anymore!

And

> That is why they're increasingly trying to pitch their service as a >
> recommendation engine with special AI sauce, not an index of the web

We provide some content discovery tools (Discover, News), but those are
offshoots made possible by our core mission and competencies: organizing the
web’s information and making it accessible to users (yes we really say that,
though frequently with a wink and a nod). We don’t try to be an index of the
web, but instead as the best place to find out anything.

For a high-level read (and some in-depth coverage, like the rater guidelines)
on what I’m taking about, consult this page:
[https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/mission/web-
use...](https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/mission/web-users/)

~~~
marksomnian
> In every way we can measure, our search engine is the best it’s ever been.

To take a quote from Jeff Bezos, "The thing I have noticed is when the
anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There's
something wrong with the way you are measuring it." Metrics are important, but
metrics definitely aren't everything.

~~~
frereubu
This provoked a wry smile from me too.

"I don't find my search results very useful."

"Yes you do! Look at these numbers!"

------
boardwaalk
Speaking generally about Google News, it's amazing that Apple of all companies
has leap frogged Google News with Apple News in terms of customization on top
of curation.

It's infuriating when a redesign has half the functionality of the original.
It's not like it was feature-rich in the first place!

It's silly not being able to remove entertainment (aka celebrity gossip) or
sports (even if I was a sport fan, I probably wouldn't care about _every_
sport -- why can't I filter to MotoGP or what have you?) and having science be
mostly several times regurgitated pop-sci and health be mostly fearing
mongering nonsense.

I also regularly notice failures where articles they group together are almost
entirely unrelated.

In the end, I still do RSS (although support in certain areas of interest are
pretty weak) and Twitter (in a read-only fashion) and go to Google News over
Apple News only by habit.

~~~
wtmt
I’ve looked at Apple News, and while its sources can be customized to some
extent, the app is not yet available in all regions (though it’s been around
for more than a couple of years). IIRC, it’s coming to Canada shortly. It also
doesn’t allow one to follow sites that Apple doesn’t know about or care about,
and if you change the region setting on the device, you’re no longer allowed
to follow certain channels (even those that are not region specific or are
smaller/individual sites).

Apple is excruciatingly slow on this and a few other things, whereas Google
News, for all its faults, is available in many countries and regions.

This is where, and why, RSS becomes a better option.

~~~
hombre_fatal
One thing that surprised me about the news app is that it gives you desktop
notifications for the sources you follow. I can't think of a more useless
distraction than getting notifications for news.

It has no real preference pane for managing notifications afaict, so I had to
unfollow everything to shut it up. And that was the last time I opened the
app.

------
stevenjohns
Google News was frustrating when I was writing articles. I use to write a lot
of original content - lots of breaking news that would generate lots of
interest around the web. Other sites would write articles and cite mine at the
bottom, and Google News would still have them ranked higher even though I was
linked to and sourced in their article and had published my article hours
before theirs.

Even worse were the sites that didn't cite at all. They'd copy my source
content quite heavily, and would still rank above me. I'd name and shame them
if I could remember who they were - there was a common small blog offender
that would do it every single time and never cite back, and would rank higher
every single time.

I was writing for a fairly well known, high-traffic and highly-ranked site
that was about 14-15 years old. But Google News would de-rank it in favor of
smaller blogs. It didn't make sense and was quite disappointing.

------
throw7
Google's redesign of News was a piece of junk. It's 100% based on "social
media" and "your browsing habits". That's the opposite of "News".

It's also broken... disabling "Open web pages in Google News" actually opens
the page in, you guessed it, Google News.

~~~
phatfish
It's primarily a means of driving AMP usage as far as I can tell, and showing
you articles they know you can't resist clicking for ad revenue.

After the old app stopped working I never used it again. Checking a couple of
sites I respect a few times a week gets me all the "news" I need.

------
euske
This is sad but hardly surprising. Google News is broken in the same way as a
unregulated free market is broken. Basically, giant distributors control the
whole market and only those who are big enough can survive. It's sad because
we lose small but independent players, which we actually need when it comes to
news organization.

I think it is kinda hypocritical when you criticize big news organizations and
keep using big news distributors like Google News. They're not necessarily bad
per se, but people should understand what's really costing them.

------
Animats
OK, so let's go to "char.gd". The top story:

"Featured read: Surface Go is proof that every computer needs LTE".

This is a "news site"?

~~~
owenwil
That would have been news when it came out, and it's a manually selected
featured story. What's your point?

~~~
untog
I think everyone has a different definition of news. I wouldn't call a product
review news, but browsing Google News I do see some in there, so...

------
arbuge
Google News is particularly broken when it comes to financial news. Searching
for the name of any major company in there will bring up perhaps a couple or
so of relevant articles, and a deluge of bot-generated drivel based on their
publicly available metrics.

------
saagarjha
> There's no reason the public shouldn't be able to see why a site was
> rejected, or whether it was approved, and the reasons about why -- let alone
> the publisher itself. Google has a responsibility to help publishers of all
> sizes, but right now, it's hard to say that it's really supporting anyone
> outside of the giants.

Every selection process is like this, unfortunately. Whether you're applying
for college or a job, telling you why you didn't get selected not very common,
for a variety of reasons. This has the side effect of keeping the process
opaque too, but that's how it is…

~~~
owenwil
True! Though I believe that for this specific segment it's really important
that Google is a little less opaque. This isn't a popularity contest or
anything; it's genuinely just gatekeeping.

------
lettergram
I built my own AI curated news called
[https://lettergram.net](https://lettergram.net)

Basically, the entire idea is that the system identifies experts and rank
content based on how often they discuss and share it. This filters out the
fake news and produces significantly better results than most "news curation"
systems out there.

Trouble for me Google News will send fake news, and is often based off of
search results (as opposed to topics you decide to follow). This leaves me
with news often unrelated to my interest and often more related to things I
needed solutions for.

Further, I want stories _related to my interests_. For instance, I follow
"Iran" I want topics related to items impact Iran, such as stories about
Israel, Syria, etc.

Finally, there is no clear "trigger" for the article. It's not based off some
sentiment change in the topic or new trend (not just topic being discussed,
but a spike in discussion, etc.). Hence, Lettergram.net can be configured to
send on sentiment changes, trend changes, or on a schedule.

Finally, Google News is a product, they have perverse motives and (such as
needing to be on boarded, which this post is about). Overall, I just couldn't
take it, so I built my own.

~~~
benbristow
Just signed up for this. A few issues I noticed:

\- Signing up for the 'free' plan requires a credit/debit card for activation?
I know why you're doing this (using Stripe's Subscription API) but it seems
very sketchy. People unfamiliar with Stripe probably wouldn't trust this.

\- After I signed up I got presented with a standard Rails error page (on the
/users) route. Not a great first impression...

\- Also the password reset system doesn't seem to work... just redirects me to
the homepage. And I can't login because my account isn't activated...

------
ggm
Does anyone else remember when Google said it would put un-constrained funds
into independent news sources to ensure un-biassed independent news was
available?

Did that stop? Did it work?

------
anonytrary
I'm not saying the Google News feed is good, but it feels like 30% news, 70%
"here's a random article you might be interested in based on your search and
other history". For example, I googled a specific breed of dog to see what it
looked like, and I saw an article about that dog breed in my Google News feed
the same day or maybe the next day. Most of the content on the feed is stuff
like that.

------
lsiebert
The new android mobile news app is missing features I cared about in ways that
are hostile to the user:

1\. The ability to have any search term be a topic. I used to be able to have
my own searches appear as a topic heading and auto populated, now the best I
can do is have them be under saved searches which is itself two screens down
on the favorites menu. 2\. The ability to open links in a browser of my choice
when clicked (I now have to click the menu for the story, select share, scroll
over to my preferred browser (firefox focus) and click that. 3\. The use of
the Android share menu that you can customize... instead they force you to use
their product specific share menu which I can't edit. This wouldn't be a big
issue if it wasn't for 2

If someone made a better google news client for android, I'd pay for it but I
haven't found anything like that.

------
tantalor
char.gd appears to be a blog, not a news site.

~~~
NathanKP
Yeah I feel bad for Owen, but the site is pretty clearly a personal blog and
not a news outlet. Just reading through samples of the articles and newsletter
a lot of it is personal opinion and personal perspective. A lot of "I" in the
blogposts. There's nothing wrong with that for a blog, but I don't expect my
news articles to be about some guy named Owen and his opinion. I want
impartial news that just sticks to the facts. Personally I think that Google
News is working completely as intended to keep this personal blog from showing
up as news, because if it did show as news then so would the thousands of
other small personal blogs, and Google News would be worthless.

~~~
gowld
Look at what is on Google News now. Almost all opinion pieces from Fox News
and Waahington Post and Washington Examiner and The Hill.

------
Angostura
Having had a quick look at the Char.gd homepage, has the author considered
that Google doesn't consider it a news source because it looks absolutely
nothing like a news source and has precious little original news reporting?

~~~
lunchables
This website is objectively bad. All of the content is about two pages down in
a text list?

------
zwischenzug
'One of the biggest frustrations I have today with the news industry is that
it's based on quantity more than anything else. Head over to Techcrunch or
Huffington Post and there's so much content coming out of these organizations
that it's impossible to keep up; my philosophy has been to publish only when
there's something worth saying as a result.

The problem, unfortunately, is that Google doesn't think you're a real
publisher if you're not writing content at that pace.'

FWIW I haven't found that - my blog gets referrals from Google News even
though I publish irregularly.

------
mastazi
> a mysterious process with hidden rules, gotchas and changing goal posts,
> designed only to allow the largest, well-known of publishers in

I have also experienced, quite often, the opposite problem, i.e. very low
quality sources creeping into my Google News feed. You know those clickbaity
sources that primarily aim to create "viral" articles to be shared on Fb and
other social media sites? That type of website. Especially in Google News'
thematic sections, e.g. "health" or "entertainment" or "technology". For this
reason I now seldom visit Google News.

------
tethys
I just did a (very quick) check and – at least here in Germany – the carousel
brings up all kinds of sites that one would not consider traditional news
outlets, e.g. mobiflip.de, stadt-bremerhaven.de and lostineu.eu. It also shows
the more traditional (but also pretty new) news site watson.de, which launched
in March 2018.

I feel like it's not really hard to be generally approved by Google. What I
know from my daily business: You have almost no chance in beating traditional
media when it comes to really popular news topics like "Angela Merkel" or
"Brexit".

------
kevinwang
Also, has Google newspaper archive closed? That was such a benefit to
humanity, but I can't find it anymore.

------
rdlecler1
We run the industry leading news publication on food and agtech and Google has
been shooting us down for five years. We have full time journalists, free
lancers, guest posts from VCs, and we’ve interviewed CEO of major food and ag
companies and carry all the breaking funding news. But Google News won’t index
us. About six months ago tbey did decide to index a new publication run by a
conference that has a lot of overlapping content. Very frustrating....

------
mrarjen
>"We require fresh content in all sections of the edition

This explains perfectly why I'm seeing horribly outdated news as if it was
submitted hours ago on my pixel google news feed feature... They most likely
just slap a different time stamp on articles to make them seem "fresh"

Proper news is a scarce resource.

------
ravivyas
The thing about google news is you need to be a news site. And at a scale
where you can have a constantly updated news sitemap
([https://support.google.com/news/publisher-
center/answer/7428...](https://support.google.com/news/publisher-
center/answer/74288?hl=en)) where posts published in the last 48 hours is
valid, rest is ignored by Google.

The problem Google news has is not everything is news, it is also gamed for
PVs. Next time google does doodle, do a search, and their will be 100s or
articles trying to get PVs from the 'news' piece.

As @bduerst mentioned, you want it harder to get into Google news, not easier.

And frankly depending on the type of "news" you write, Google News won't even
be a great traffic source.

~~~
C1sc0cat
Absolutely most sites unless your a real news publisher should not be in
Google news.

~~~
ravivyas
In-fact many sites should be removed from google news

------
wyldfire
> designed only to allow the largest, well-known of publishers in.

This seems like one effective method to combat fly-by-night "publications"
that exist to spread falsehoods. It's warfare.

Also this seems like it's somewhat in line with the original idea behind
PageRank.

But yes I would believe that it comes with drawbacks.

~~~
kortilla
The original idea behind PageRank had nothing to do with well known or name
brands. That’s precisely the crap that other “home pages” were based on that
google disrupted.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
So true, Google's _raison d 'etre_ then wasn't "make money".

------
AndrewKemendo
Is it possible that you're being ignored/rejected in part because you have a
.gd domain?

That sounds really dumb and petty, but for some reason it seems like something
they would consider because people just instinctively look for .com

------
natch
I give you points for writing well and not having the usual flaws. Maybe you
could consolidate narrow topics into broader ones so each topic has new
content each day. Think “tech” as a single topic instead of “Microsoft” and
“Google” etc. as separate ones.

I would have said just give up because they are interested in big news sites,
but they do include fake sources sometimes (or used to last time I looked)
with lines like:

“The calamity of the day was highlight markered by insertion into the interest
of massive public”

...which are obviously the result of some sort of gaming of the system. If
Google could boot those out and include more real sites, that would be an
improvement.

------
pX0r
Right swipe and left swipe remove the item from the feed. Gives me i-taught-
google-news-wrongly anxiety. News hell for the romfl!

------
franco18
There are a few ways to it:

1\. You need to be in Google's News Publisher Center 2\. You need to be
regularly posting news on your website 3\. You need to have your website AMP
(this is must now) 4\. Your website's SEO should be powerful 5\. There should
be more and more people reading and spreading your news online

------
porpoisely
Now or 12 years ago? 12 years ago, it was the stories getting the most
traction. It was mostly user driven, objective and fairly diverse. After the
large news companies attacked google news many years ago, they essentially
turned over the platform to major news companies ( NYTimes, WaPo, CNN, etc ).

One of the things that attracted me to google news when it first started was
it's broad, open and "fair". You could genuinely find different news
perspectives from different countries, news companies, etc.

After large news companies complained, Google "localized" the news and when
that didn't work, they essentially turned over the platform to "authoritative"
sources.

The attacks on facebook are the same attacks the nytimes, wapo, cnn, etc used
against google news. "Propaganda", "toxic", etc. Funny how they don't complain
about google news anymore when it is even more propagandistic and toxic than
ever. When facebook agrees to start spamming nytimes, wapo, cnn, etc to their
users, I bet the complaints will slowly die down.

------
ucaetano
TL;DR: Blogger with a low-readership blog (for internet standards) wants to be
included in news carousel at the top of Google results but is rejected.

So Google News is broken.

------
tonto
I have complained about this before but the "swipe right" news view on Android
used to be nice but now it's so hyper focused on returning results related to
your latest Google search that it is really annoying..

------
wnevets
Google news is one instance where I wished google spied on me more. For some
reason its always recommending stories I care absolutely nothing about like
soccer players being traded or small town news stories from the midwest.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
News seems to be mainly about propaganda nowadays.

Even sources like BBC, half the "news" is telling you what to think, the other
half is "in news today, this TV programme is super awesome; and surprise it's
on our channel tonight, all your neighbours are watching it!".

/meh

------
macawfish
By writing a trash piece, according to my resrarch

------
sys_64738
Maybe Google News is in a death spiral towards cancellation.

------
blakesterz
It's broken for me in a different, far less important way. I can't get the
darn "For you Recommended based on your interests" section to stop showing me
stupid stories about dumb things I searched one time for 2 years ago. No
matter how many times I've told it to "show me fewer stories about this" or
"more stories about this" it's still news that's just total garbage. Singers,
TV Shows, music, pointless crap I don't care anything about.

I search Google News all the time for stories on security, and books, and
libraries, and it almost never recommends stories on things I'm actually
interested in.

Kind of amazing just how bad that algorithm is. Really not a big deal, I'm
just surprised at how bad Google can fail at something that seems so easy.

~~~
brownbat
I believe they killed the feature that let you block entire sections you
aren't interested in. If I'm right, you must take sports news from Google
News, it is not optional.

Customizing sources is pretty limited too. The Science section is full of pop-
sci headlines, often exaggerated from studies, rather than just direct links
to new journal articles.

RSS might be the better option here...

~~~
Memosyne
>science section is full of pop-sci headlines

This is painfully accurate. The technology section is also bad, since no
matter how hard I try to get Google News to show me technical/interesting
content, it keeps recommending me banal stories of "the blockchain
revolution", smart-phones, and video games.

Any suggestions for a decent RSS reader?

~~~
guybedo
I've tried many RSS readers since the terrible day Google shut down
GoogleReader, and i used to have at least 2 or 3 websites for my news: a RSS
reader, GoogleNews for the top stories, etc...

In the end i was tired to have to switch between apps and websites to get my
news, and was frustrated by Google News, not enough categories, not enough
content sources...

So i decided to build a Google News/RSS Reader crossover that i could use to
manage my RSS feeds, and check the Top Stories of the day, all of that in a
single app. I added some processing on top of that to automatically cateogrize
content, extract names of people, places, companies, etc...

It still is an early version, there's a lot of room for improvements and new
features but i feel it's definitely going in the right direction.

You can check it out here: [https://aktu.io/about](https://aktu.io/about)

Would love some feedback!

~~~
blakesterz
This looks really cool! No public demo?

~~~
guybedo
no demo, it is live: [https://aktu.io](https://aktu.io)

------
ereyes01
I used to love Google News's customizable sections- I would set those to
Spanish-language international sections from other countries, and the
different perspective was really refreshing and informative compared to what
you see in the US International section.

Since the last re-design, Google News seemingly dropped the customization, and
has devolved into an endless toxic carousel of US-slanted political opinion in
most sections, half of which seem to come from pay-walled sources. I have lost
all control of what I want to read, and instead have to rely on their opaque
feed, most of which I'm not actually that interested in (I can only take so
much politics).

Does anyone know of an alternative that's more like the Google News of old?

~~~
guybedo
Shameless plug here but i built something that you might like. It's a
GoogleNews/RssReader crossover. It aggregates thousands of content sources
across the world to give you the top stories of the day. And you can manage
your RSS feeds too, best of both worlds :-)

You can check it out here: [https://aktu.io/about](https://aktu.io/about)

Feedback welcome!

~~~
ereyes01
Thanks this is cool! A couple times when I clicked on some stories, I couldn't
see a link to the original publication. I'll keep an eye on this, I'm sure
it'll keep getting better!

------
rfdearborn
My biggest criticisms of Google News are:

1) low signal-to-noise ratio - i.e., lots of duplicative stories, publishers
are commoditized, and there are no mechanisms to distinguish (and reward!)
high quality content

2) paywalls and/or extreme ad loads lurking everywhere

3) local news is a second-class citizen

4) lack of user control in customizing topics, while at the same time all the
(uncontrollable) targeted "for you" stories tend to overfit (e.g., Google
seems to think tech news and the Patriots are all I care about)

In general I'm extremely dissatisfied with the functionality of available news
products and with the consequences of attention-optimized digital news media
on our world. There's a lot of data which indicates most people feel some
degree of similarly [1][2][3][4] and I think there's opportunity and demand
for creating better.

As such, last summer I set out to build Gatherscope - a news ecosystem
designed from first principles to serve readers and sustain quality
journalism. At the moment, the high-level plan is:

1) build an aggregator layer that's differentiated in the breadth, depth,
quality, and customizability of content that's surfaced and in applying
machine clustering and summarization to make it faster and easier for busy
consumers to digest what current events are happening, see varying
perspectives about them, go deeper where worthwhile, and then get on with
their lives

2) stack other layers around this - either by building them or through 3rd
party relationships - to further deliver a rich, insightful, frictionless UX
(e.g., bundled multi-publisher subscriptions, community quality review,
synthesized audio, contextual search and feedback loops, publisher tools for
local journalists)…these should all work independently but best together

Today there's a (quite-rough) MVP of part 1 live at
[https://www.gatherscope.com](https://www.gatherscope.com) and a very long way
to go :)

All this to say: if any of this sounds interesting and/or you have strong,
thoughtful opinions about news media, I'd love to hear from you. I've recently
begun a hunt for collaborators, and even if that's not for you it would be
good to hear how to build you a useful product faster.

Cheers,

Rob

[1] [http://www.digitalnewsreport.org/survey/2018/overview-key-
fi...](http://www.digitalnewsreport.org/survey/2018/overview-key-
findings-2018/)

[2] [http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/06/05/almost-
seven...](http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/06/05/almost-seven-in-ten-
americans-have-news-fatigue-more-among-republicans/)

[3] [http://www.pewglobal.org/2018/01/11/publics-globally-want-
un...](http://www.pewglobal.org/2018/01/11/publics-globally-want-unbiased-
news-coverage-but-are-divided-on-whether-their-news-media-deliver/)

[4] [http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/07/30/newsroom-
emp...](http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/07/30/newsroom-employment-
dropped-nearly-a-quarter-in-less-than-10-years-with-greatest-decline-at-
newspapers/)

------
camjohnson26
Google News was the trigger for me to start moving away from Google platforms
because of privacy concerns. It felt wrong to scan the results and have
something catch your eye only to remember you were looking at something
similar earlier in the day. Customization may be good for some areas but seems
dangerous for news.

The other shocker for me was when they released a way to view your historical
location. I had had no idea that the app was tracking my daily commute for the
previous year, and it was enough to make me switch to DuckDuckGo.

------
rinchik
Well looks like OP's site as well. Just check the news.G, looks fine.

~~~
agrippanux
The article is about how getting his site’s articles listed by Google News is
a broken process, not that Google News itself is broken.

~~~
reaperducer
I didn't even know there was a process. I know a local news source that does
great work but isn't part of Google News, even though its constantly ranked
highest for its content.

Is there a link or something?

~~~
owenwil
You can read about the process here:
[https://support.google.com/news/publisher-
center/answer/4078...](https://support.google.com/news/publisher-
center/answer/40787?hl=en)

