Question about Google News

[spacehabitats]

I have a question about how Google News works. I am not proposing any kind of conspiracy, but I would like to understand how this Internet tool works. It certainly is not intuitive.

I found out long ago that I could not just go to the news page if I wanted to know about Ron Paul. But when I search Google News for "Ron Paul" selecting for "relevance" I get a strange mixture of articles.
For example, just now I got a cluster of articles with the headline "Ron Paul's Fascist Views at Jan 5 TV Forum; Obama Matches Him" on a website for Bay Area IndyMedia. This was a very scathing, and idiotic article stating that Ron Paul was exactly like all the other Republican candidates except for his stance on the Iraq war. Now my question is this, how does an article like this end up near the top of the list (on Google), sandwiched between articles by the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and CBS News? The only thing remarkable about the article seemed to be the ignorance and prejudice of its author. Not that the mainstream media articles tend to be much better. But at least I could understand Google making me wade through articles from well-known news sources. Any insight?

 

[kahless]

These guys are super liberals over there and have a history of censoring conservative news sites. So it is no suprise that they manipulate the results on Google News.

 

[raiha]

Well its going to be tough boycotting Google

 

[MoneyWhereMyMouthIs2]

Google was friendly to Ron Paul before anyone demanded it. Their news algorithm is what it is. Their search engine algorithm has its problems as well. Indybay is junk, but the algos can't tell.

 

[santopia]

Google news is completely automated. There is zero human editing.

It's a playground for their tech engineers to develop and devise different search algorithms.

 

[jp5065]

it is probably similar to how they rank webpages...
articles with the most pages linking to it get higher rank

 

[amy31416]

I've been with google since they were beta in '97, I don't trust them anymore despite the fact that they are my main e-mail. They got too big to not be corrupt.

 

[spacehabitats]

so does that mean links to the host web site or to the specific page that contains the article? If it is to the hosting web site I do not see how Bay Area IndyMedia could possibly end up in the same ballpark with the Washington Post. On the other hand, if it is links to that specific article how could there be so many links to an article that was just posted 12 hours ago? I know I have heard of "Google bombs" that played with the ranking of a page on Google. Could there be a similar technique utilized by the dark side to enhance the visibility of "bad" news?

Again, I do not wish to start another conspiracy theory. However, since I hope that we are all in this for the long haul, we need to become cognizant of the techniques that might be used to disseminate misinformation or, conversely, that could be used by RP supporters to disseminate the truth.

 

[Kasira]

These guys are super liberals over there and have a history of censoring conservative news sites. So it is no suprise that they manipulate the results on Google News.

Not if you believe this article. Ron Paul is the most popular republican candidate at Google.