A puzzle, and a cause for concern
Kaiser Fung, founder of Principal Analytics Prep and author of Numbersense, reports on a disturbing encounter with Google News.
Last week, I referenced the Wall Street Journal article titled "You Graduated Cum Laude, So Did Everyone Else," published on July 2nd.
When I wrote up the blog post, it was July 4th, two days later.
I couldn't find the article on Google News. Even when I input the entire title of the article, Google News still came up empty. Here is the screen shot:
It found irrelevant articles from WSJ, some from months ago but it did not retrieve the most recent relevant article - even when I wrote the entire title of the article!
I also tried other queries like "wsj melissa korn" (author of the article) but obstinately,this one article just refuses to come to the surface.
The problem is specific to the algorithm behind Google News. When I tried the exact same query on Google's search engine, the first result coming back is the correct one:
Next, I experimented on Bing. Both Bing News and Bing Search return the expected result.
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The puzzle: what is confusing Google News? how did the algorithm miss the most obvious result?
The cause for concern: the algorithm behind Google News (and other news sites) controls what we see and what we don't see. We have essentially zero information about why the algorithm selects what specific articles for us.
Comment below if you have thoughts about this.
