Hi folks. If you’re worried that Google is giving you biased search results when it comes to news, or just unsure which of the many search results to click on, then you might like The Factual’s news search engine, which I built with my co-founder, Ajoy.
We rank individual news articles for how informative and objective they are using a variety of signals that proxy expertise: depth and extent of research (links, quotes), neutral tone of writing, historical topic focus and ratings of journalist, and source reputation. We overlay political bias ratings and select multiple highly informative articles across the political spectrum on each topic. We also give additional context like read time, and make it easy to filter out paywalled articles.
Rats. 26 actually (scroll down) but bad presentation layer for sure. Our search engine doesn't do great on one-word search terms so "ukraine mariupol" shows 100+ articles.
To add to that there is something I find irksome in your language around "unbiased" which I interpret something like "it would be unbiased to have an equal number of articles from MSNBC and Fox News on topic X where MSNBC and Fox disagree". That is, "bias" is a question of left and right and that the truth is somewhere in between.
I'd say on topics like abortion the "truth is out there" just like it is in title sequence of the X files... That is, there is no truth at all. The main sin of this kind of news coverage is that it fills a very limited agenda and displaces other things, secondarily it stirs people up emotionally and keeps them watching, donating to candidates and political advocacy organizations and other things that ultimately disenfranchise and disempower people.
The #1 bias in the news media is "if it bleeds it leads", #2 is the proliferation of pseudo-events
1. We do not enforce an equal number of articles from all sides of the political spectrum. We use the political lean ratings only to help identify different framings on topics so people can see different angles to a story because issues are complex and no single article will have all the facts.
2. We agree that media skews towards outrage because it funds their advertising based business model. That's why our ratings emphasize the most objective and least opinionated writing. And thankfully, there is a lot of great writing that is trying to inform, rather than emotionally manipulate people. It's hard to find which is why we built such a search engine.
3. News orgs are eager to keep publishing stories even if the topics are not that important because they want more of your attention. That's why we group articles by topics on our site (factual.news) so that you can actually "finish reading the news". Oh, we're also ad-free and don't care to keep you longer than absolutely necessary.
