Well, the company is citing a technical problem as the reason that the Google News front page was an hour later than other online media outlets in reporting the death of NBC's Tim Russert.
If that's the real reason -- and you can color me six shades of skeptical -- it's a technical problem that appears to crop up immediately following the final breaths of celebrities ... not to mention other major breaking news events.
According to this morning's New York Times:
The death of Tim Russert of NBC News this month quickly became a top article on the nation's biggest news sites.
The front page of Google News took about an hour to catch up.
Google blamed a technical problem for the delay and said it was not a sign that its news site, whose content is compiled entirely by computer programs, lacks timeliness.
The "technical problem" (eyebrow-raising quotation marks are mine) must also have bitten Google News in the behind upon the sudden death of the Rev. Jerry Falwell on May 15 of last year. On that occasion, perhaps owing to Falwell's greater fame, it took Google News less time -- just over a half-hour -- to catch up with its speedier media brethren.
The real technical problem with Google News is that it depends solely on software to assemble its main page -- nary an editor is involved -- a fact Google has long touted as a virtue. (Yes, this is personal, too.)
Google News is great at aggregating news once coverage has gotten rolling across the Internet. That's what they do: sweep major stories into nice neat piles (actually, not always so neat). It's also great at indexing stories -- mine are often available via Google News within 20 minutes of being posted.
However, it's the need for a pile that makes Google News so slow when a story is red hot. Until that pile forms, the software apparently is reluctant to deem the story worthy of being featured on the front page.
It's not just major news outlets such as CNN that do better: Even social media sites such as Fark do a better job than Google News of putting the biggest news events in front of their audiences fast. This occurs because Fark has editors who can wield such power. While I cannot say for certain, I'd bet good money that Fark reported Russert's death well before Google News.
Personally, I learned of Russert's death via an e-mail from another Network World editor who had spotted a one-line bulletin on the Web site of CNN, an organization that understands the meaning of breaking news. As I started rummaging around the Internet looking for details, it never even occurred to me to check Google News.
That's because when news is breaking -- and I mean breaking right now -- Google News is the last place on Earth anyone interested would want to be. An hour or so later, they're champs.
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Yea verily
Web 3.0 = editting
It's compiled entirely by a computer? Good.
I'd rather not have human editors selecting what stories we should or shouldn't be seeing at certain times. Let an unbiased machine do it.
And are people so neurotically impatient about their web news that they can't wait an extra 30-60 minutes for a juicy breaking news story? Geez man.
Google News
While their tendency to be behind other sites on major stories is a bit annoying, for me it's not much of an issue because I have a tendency to check cable news channels and other news sites throughout the day, so I often get fast breaking news that way. When I later want to read more in-depth of what's going on, by then Google will usually have caught up and have some decent content to offer.
For me, though, the BIGGEST pet peeve I have is that there are a few satire sites that are included in their listings. Sometimes they're marked with "(Satire)" but other times they're posted with no warning and it isn't until you click through to the site and can read more than just a few words that you know what you're reading isn't true.
Unfortunately, not everyone looks for the "Satire" warning (or knows what it means) or picks up on it, and I've seen people blogging in an outrage over a satire piece that they found through Google and took as a serious news story.
If their goal is truly to help people be able to find news stories on a variety of topics, they really should make sure that they don't include satirical or parody sites in their spidering. Including them adds NOTHING to anyone actual understanding of a news story and often leads to confusion and false stories being spread by people who didn't realize it was a satire and sent copies to their friends or blogged about it. Not a good thing.
Not that big of a deal
I am not sure Google being a little late to the game is that big of a deal. I think that Google having news is a nice feature, and I do go to Google News a few times a day, but if it is a little late no big deal. CNN and/or Fox being slow on news is a BIG problem (actually Fox being UNBIASED about news is a BIG problem) as that is what they do for a living.
What a worthless article.
What a worthless article. The author is getting mad over what Google News is designed specifically to do, aggregate news. Since there is no human intervention, of course it is not going to pick up and display breaking news coverage right away. Not to menton an article has to have so many different sources before it will ever be displayed, let alone on the front page.
Maybe a developer could figure out a way to have the aggregator determine what is "important" breaking news and what's just new, but I don't have the programming knowledge to suggest how to do such a thing.
Author obviously has no clue and nothing else to talk about.
Total FAIL. Author totally missed the point of Google News. Just because it's Google, doesn't mean it has to be number one at everything.
Well, even though it was
Well, even though it was late, at least it was real news...
...unlike anything on this site.
30 minutes? seriously who
30 minutes? seriously who cares. Especially the last breaths of celebreties.
Google News Response Time
Thank goodness Google is not that smart yet.
It's plain unnecessary to
It's plain unnecessary to blame Google for its hour-late news. Google is not even a news organization to begin with, so let's not expect too much. Besides, there is news EVERYWHERE.