Google News Separates Blogs from News

Google News has started to separate blogs and news links, according to the Google Operating System...

"When you view a cluster in Google News, there's a new option to filter sources: you can restrict news articles to blogs and to local news sites that are relevant to your query. The filters are a good way to find opinionated articles and more up-to-date information from local sites."

I never understood why they have a separate search engine for blogs. Further, this just blurs the line. Take a look at this cluster of blog links on Obama, which includes a lot of traditional media blogs. All of this is becoming a giant cake mix as the Google Web index gets faster. It's not so easy anymore to keep the pigs and cows contained.

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Comments

[MGA]

I believe, separating blogs and news will clarify the objective and subjective information.

[Scott Germaise]

Why separate news/blogs/abstracts or any other 'content types' from just Web? It's all web, right?

Sure, it makes obvious sense to separate by multimedia type or symbolic search, (e.g. chemistry or math symbols and such), but why separate out textual content at all?

Because context matters. Web based news may be on the web, but typically it will be in particular formats - if not technical - at least visual and content format. Blogs... are a tougher animal. What is blog? Is it that which has a feed? Or that which is organized in a journal timeline? Or perceived tone of voice? It's a little of all three. Is it just that calling something a blog makes it a blog?

And what about discussion groups and forums and other content?

These things are separated because people have - reasonable - expectations on format, tone and type of experience. The medium is not the message and never has been. Or if it is, only to a very limited degree. It was and is a very catchy saying. Which is unfortunate since it's just wrong. However, varying media and their limitations obviously make themselves amenable to certain types or flavors of communications. Once upon a time, aviation weather data was all in esoteric code due to teletype limitations whereas today, there's plenty of plaintext sources. (Though Twitter balks this trend.) Regardless...

There's a lot of different ways to define "vertical" content. Allow users to choose among these types of content is just one more method of disambiguating content. Which has always been, and will increasingly be a huge issue.

[Lake Hartwell]

"I believe, separating blogs and news will clarify the objective and subjective information."

Interesting perspective but which do you label as subjective and which objective?

Mainstream media, i.e., New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, et al, may be accepted as objective but IMO bloggers have proven to be more objective in many cases. As a newspaper insider I can tell you that every major newspaper has an agenda, and so do most broadcast media players. They are all ad and/or subscriber driven so the almighty dollar comes first.

Sure there are many writers on staff who remain ethical and honorable but in the world of commercial "news" it's very simple to keep any story they write that doesn't comply with the company goals out of print and off the air.

Blogs on the other hand are more likely to exist for the genuine purpose of publishing the truth.

just my .02