Google News: time to get transparent

Andrew Nachison at the Editors BlogConf in Seoul:

In a session I chaired yesterday at the World Editor’s Forum in Seoul, Google News creator Krishna Bharat revealed, well, virtually nothing about the sources Google spiders and “clusters” to create Google News, other than that it’s “more than” 4,500 – a number the company had cited in the past.

What values, biases and editorial judgments are reflected in the inclusion of those 4,500+ sites, and exclusion of others? We don’t know because Google won’t name the sources.

Calling all hackers and web analytics geniuses: couldn’t you spider Google News and figure out the identity of their sources over a period of time – and publish live/continuously updated data about Google’s sources?

Last fall JD Lasica thought he sniffed bias in the Google news results, and Erik Ulken recently described in the Online Journalism Review a study he conducted, which concluded, “articles returned in Google News searches are significantly more likely to have an ideological bias than those returned in searches on Yahoo News.”

Dan Gillmor, who joined our panel discussion (along with Joi Ito, who wrote about the session) said at the conference (and more here) that Google should be more transparent about its sources and the algorithm used to create its results, so that users can judge for themselves whether there’s bias in the process. …

Absolutely. Come on, Google. What’s the harm in a little transparency?

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.