Google Goes Ga Ga for New Corporate News Model

Google's right turn is already effecting alternative news sources. This means the end of these fact checking resources for Google users. Bye Bye Google {ape}

Google searches for quality not quantity
Special Report from New Scientist

Barry Fox
11:00 01 May 2005

GOOGLE has plans that will dramatically improve the results of internet news searches, by ranking them according to quality rather than simply by their date and relevance to search terms. The ambitious system is revealed by patents filed in the US and around the world (WO 2005/029368) by researchers based at the company's headquarters in Mountain View, California.

At the moment the company's search engine throws up thousands of "hits" in response to simple entries such as "Iraq", which lead to news websites. These are ranked either in order of relevance or by date, so that the most recent or most focused appear at the top of the huge list.

This means that articles carrying more authority, say from CNN or the BBC, can be ousted from the first page of results, simply because they are not as recent or as relevant to the keyword entered in the search line.

Now Google, whose name has become synonymous with internet searching, plans to build a database that will compare the track record and credibility of all news sources around the world, and adjust the ranking of any search results accordingly. The database will be built by continually monitoring the number of stories from all news sources, along with average story length, number with bylines, and number of the bureaux cited, along with how long they have been in business. Google's database will also keep track of the number of staff a news source employs, the volume of internet traffic to its website and the number of countries accessing the site.

Google will take all these parameters, weight them according to formulae it is constructing, and distil them down to create a single value. This number will then be used to rank the results of any news search.

The patent also reveals that the same system could be roped in to rank other search results, not simply news. So sales and services could in the future be listed on the basis of price and the reputation of the company involved.