I don’t believe there’s a built in bias.

The question is — are TV stations formatting their content in a way to be included in Google News?

My guess is that most are not.

I know that our TV stations and newspapers publish according to Google’s technical specs and we’re well represented in our markets.

Google now pings us throughout the day to the point that we’re now on their site and articles are indexed sometimes within minutes of publication.

For instance, I can write a headline for our front page that links to one of our internal blogs, and Google News will ignore it. But if I copy the story and post on a “normal” HTML page, it gets grabbed almost immediately.

My problem with Google News is that it seems to randomly forget about our site every week or so, and won’t include anything new for about 24 hours. It must be some weird programming quirk.

@TR: Agreed. Hyperlocal sites like ours get very little play from Google, even though we’re web independent. It’s not equivalent access to the search user.

So I’m having a hard time seeing what the big deal is here.

they’ll monetize it, don’t worry.

But still, there is a lot of duplication and they seem to be using a flawed algorythm to select and organize the headlines. Even sorting by relevance or date brings up an odd mix of stories.

There is some small value here, but honestly, I don’t think that any computer can do as good a job of selecting relevant content as even a single pair of human eyes.