Google Tries Social Inputs for News
April 27, 2011
In the midst of farming and Panda bashing, pundits and poobahs did not pound the drum for Google’s social ranking tests. Nieman Journalism Lab did examine one of Google’s projects in “The Layered Look: How Google News Is Integrating the Social Web.” Google keeps plugging away with social features, of course, but this one is a little different. It’s a layer of social networking- based rankings integrated into the Google News page. Writer Simon Owens explains:
I spoke with Jeannie Hornung, a spokesperson for Google News, about the various ways Twitter and other social media platforms are used by the aggregator. She pointed first to the ‘Most Shared’ section, found on the right sidebar near the bottom of the main page. At the time of this writing, it displays headlines from a mixture of blogs and more traditional news outlets and allows you to sort the most popular stories by day, week, and month.
Owens was unable to get straight answers as to how exactly some of the ranking works. Twitter feeds factor prominently, but it looks like the share feature also plays a part.
The component may seem superfluous to some. But for those of us looking for the most important (or at least most shared) news stories in a limited browsing time, it can be a helpful tool.
One thing is certain, some Googlers will respond to the money carrot that Google is dangling in front of its engineers. Will those crunchy treats result in real progress in the social media sector? Facebook, according to some, is on a roll. To date, Microsoft, not Google, has a stake in Facebook. More significantly, when making news, a Googler in Egypt mentioned Facebook as one of the conduits for the social movement. Will that type of nuance be hooked into the new social news algorithm?
Cynthia Murrell April 27, 2011
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