Web makes sense of news sites
"SEATTLE (Reuters) - In a year marked by war, Arnold Schwarzenegger's campaign to become California's next governor and the largest blackout in U.S. history, news junkies are facing a surging flood of news. "
Yahoo! News - News Sites Make Sense of Web's Flood of Info: That's why many are turning to Web sites that can sift through stories published around the clock on the Internet such as Google News (http://news.google.com) and Columbia Newsblaster (http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/nlp/newsblaster/).
News sites, or "aggregators," are not new to the Web, but these sites and a few others are gaining in popularity because they constantly take a wide sample of news and distill them into digestible headlines, without human intervention.
Web makes sense of news sites
Yahoo! News - News Sites Make Sense of Web's Flood of Info:
Sun Aug 24, 9:23 AM ET
By Reed Stevenson
SEATTLE (Reuters) - In a year marked by war, Arnold Schwarzenegger's campaign to become California's next governor and the largest blackout in U.S. history, news junkies are facing a surging flood of news.
"That's why many are turning to Web sites that can sift through stories published around the clock on the Internet such as Google News (http://news.google.com) and Columbia Newsblaster (http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/nlp/newsblaster/).
News sites, or 'aggregators,' are not new to the Web, but these sites and a few others are gaining in popularity because they constantly take a wide sample of news and distill them into digestible headlines, without human intervention.
"In general computers are better at dealing with large volumes of information," Marissa Mayer, Google's director of consumer Web products, said. "It would be virtually impossible for human beings to cluster (organize) stories based on topic."
Google, the popular Internet search engine, launched its news service nearly a year ago to collect news from more than 4,500 global sources. Google News displays top stories and has news categories for global, United States, business, technology, sports, entertainment and health.
Google News is similar in design to Google's minimalist search pages, and displays relevant news pictures alongside the first few sentences of every top story.
Google appears to have bigger plans for its news service, which has no advertising. It is still in beta mode, or a test mode that precedes a full-blown Web service, Mayer said, because it still has a few kinks that need to be fixed.
Mayer did not say whether Google would eventually charge users for access to the Web site.
Newsblaster, a research project at New York's Columbia University, does something different with top news stories: it creates news summaries of three to five sentences automatically, without a human editor.
"The idea was basically to handle very large quantities of news sites and look for similarities and differences among them." said Kathy McKeown, professor and chair of computer science at Columbia.
"But we can't do it without the original reporting by the reporters," McKeown said.
TIPS & TRICKS
News junkies have come up with various shortcuts to keep up to date.
One method is to search for news about a specific topic, country, person or company in Google News, then to save the search as a bookmark. Calling up the bookmark brings up a Web page with the latest news collected by Google on that particular subject.
Yahoo News has long had the ability to send customized news alerts via e-mail and the New York Times Co. (NYSE:NYT - news) offers news tracking for a yearly fee.
Google also recently added a Google News Alerts (http://www.google.com/newsalerts) feature that allows users to have Google News search results sent to them automatically via e-mail whenever a matching news article is detected by Google.
McKeown said that her team plans to eventually give Newsblaster the ability to track news as well.
Google also recently added an Advanced Search feature to Google News to allow user to search by date, location and other specific parameters.
Other Web sites are also stepping up to challenge Google News and Newsblaster's lead in collecting news.
NewsInEssence (http://www.newsinessence.com/nie.cgi), a Web site operated by a research group at the University of Michigan, also ranks and summarizes news from around the Web.
Although Google News and Newsblaster currently only track news in English, both said that they are considering offering news in various languages. Google already has news sites in French and German as well as various English language versions for Australia, India, Britain, Canada and New Zealand.
Since Google News and Newsblaster don't have reporters producing stories, they are not included in Nielsen Netratings' monthly ranking of top news sites, which in June ranked the Web site of MSNBC, a joint venture between Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq:MSFT - news) and NBC, at the top of its list. That was followed by CNN, Yahoo News and AOL News.
NBC is owned by General Electric Co. (NYSE:GE - news) while CNN and America Online are units of AOL Time Warner Inc. (NYSE:AOL - news)
In fact, news aggregators such as Google News and Newsblaster drive much of the traffic toward those sites, said Google's Mayer. Google declined to say how much Web traffic passes through Google News.
Yahoo News (http://news.yahoo.com), operated by Internet media company Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news), also collects news from various sources, including Reuters Group Plc and the Associated Press, but it pays for content, which is in turn often offered to Web visitors for free with advertising.
News aggregation, however, is not a new concept. During the dot-com bubble, PointCast received millions of dollars in funding in the hope that its "push" model of sending customized feeds of news stories over the Internet would revolutionize news distribution.
(The Livewire column appears weekly. Comments or questions on this one can be e-mailed to reed.stevenson(at)reuters.com.)
August 26, 2003 at 02:49 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink
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