Google News trumpets its ability to stay abreast of current events "solely by computer algorithms without human intervention." But the robot approach has come under fire. Rather than representing news, the bots often reflect a bias that exists on the Net. Search for, say, John Kerry, and you'll get fringe sites like s5000.com. We asked Krishna Bharat, chief scientist for Google News, if he should put a few pulses on the payroll for quality control.
WIRED: Most news sites employ humans to try to pull together balanced content. Why not hire a few people to guard against bias?
BHARAT: Google News is not in the business of having humans regulate how much representation there is from the Republicans in response to a certain query and how much is from Democrats. Once you start doing that job, there is a huge responsibility, and we'd rather allow the natural distribution of a given query to surface. I think that having people look at the hundreds of thousands of articles that come in every day is just not practical. Bias may have happened once or twice on certain queries. I don't think the problem is widespread.
I just did a search for "Google news biased," in quotes. It returned 7,370 hits. Don't you think anyone searching Google News for a particular topic expects a fair representation of the news?
If you search for a particular news event, the fact that you pick certain words in your query is going to affect the results you get. But that's true of search in general, and I don't think there's a consistent bias - no pattern has been established. The truth is, Google News doesn't have a point of view. It's a computer, and computers do not understand these topics the way humans do and can't be systematically biased in any direction. The outcome is completely neutral to the topic.
Why not just filter out the opinion sites?
Google News' focus is on diversity, and that's where the real added value is. It's a bit like a bookstore that takes content on a single subject and puts it all on the same shelf. People use Google News to complement their favorite source, like CNN. You come to Google News when you want a wide range of articles - in both opinions and style - on that subject.
- Lucas Graves
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Google's Newsbot Isn't Biased!
