New Scientist reports that Google News is developing a database of credible news sources so their search engines can factor in a news service’s track record. Articles are currently listed only by relevancy or date, with some hate sites granted prominence (resulting in problems like this, this, this and this).
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.
(Hat tip: Cyberjournalist)
