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from O'Reilly Network: Google Needs People [Oct. 11, 2002]
"Partly, we fear the truth. Google News will not be the first nor the last software application to perform some work more efficiently and effectively than humans. Mostly, however, we fear the lies and the harmful ripple effects they cause.
Google's claim that it offers "a news service compiled solely by computer algorithms without human intervention" is misleading, at best. What about the programmers who wrote the algorithms? What about the designers and architects who structured and organized the templates? What about the thousands of reporters and editors who wrote and selected the articles?"
But someone hasn't given up on humans yet.. this same week Yahoo announced a new stretegy to blend human intellegence with computer efficiancy. So who will out in the end? Humans are still the most powerful computing machine in existance. But they are slow and fickle. Computers are swift, impartial and effective but uncreative and lack common sense. And one of the hairiest questions of search-- disambiguation-- is still something humans do best. We'll have to wait and see what the future of search will hold.
We're quite happy assuming that google's search is purely computational, no human mediation, so why the disquiet when the subject matter is news?
Well, apart from the humans involved in the source material, all the other human work is likely content neutral.
...oh and what about the 2 or 3 years spent by thousands of bloggers making the relationships BETWEEN information items meaningful.
Google isn't doing their news service without people. They're just leveraging the efforts of 4,000 editors who work for someone else. Plus they're doing so using assumptions built into their code by a programmer, and most programmers are people too.
That's a bit like saying an automated catalog of artworks leverages the efforts of 4,000 artists putting paint to canvas. Editorial efforts are very much a *part* of news and journalism, part of the definition.
Dare I say it? Google News sucks.