I signed up for Google News alerts the day they launched, selecting two terms for them to track for me, the first incredible obscure (my name, Mernit), and the second, fairly ubiquitious (AOL). It’s been a few days and here’s my impression of the service–it ain’t the world-beater Google news is, in facrs it’s kinda a yawn.
What’s the diff? The alerts systems sent me the same eight or so stories listed as most relevant on the news pages today, so it is accurate, but it seems far more limited that actually using the news service.
I think the problem is not with the technology, but with me, the user–the email string of alerts is literally just that, and nothing else. When I read news at news.google.com, I am always opening new screens to conduct new searches on related terms I find; the alerts don’t support that–they’re more of a notification system useful for big events, such as AOL getting sold to Verizon or something.
One way to address this issue would be through a form of proximity mapping that would give you shorter summaries of related topics, or that would use collaborative filtering based on your behavior to become smart about what related stories and links to send you.
Another–and this is the OBVIOUS one–would be to make all Google news stories RSS-enabled, like Feedster does with its searches, so users can digest keyword search string results and take it from there–it’s the same technology they’re using now, but delivered in an entirely different way.
So,Google, you listening? How about :
A) Making your news available as RSS feeds with great coding, so they work with most newsreaders
B) Team up with some of the newsreader companies to create a server-side newsreader right on Google (I know the newsreader folks will hate this idea, but it IS inevitable, so live with it…)
I signed up for Google News alerts the day they launched, selecting two terms for them to track for me, the first incredible obscure (my name, Mernit), and the second, fairly ubiquitious (AOL). It’s been a few days and here’s my impression of the service–it ain’t the world-beater Google news is, in facrs it’s kinda a yawn.
What’s the diff? The alerts systems sent me the same eight or so stories listed as most relevant on the news pages today, so it is accurate, but it seems far more limited that actually using the news service.
I think the problem is not with the technology, but with me, the user–the email string of alerts is literally just that, and nothing else. When I read news at news.google.com, I am always opening new screens to conduct new searches on related terms I find; the alerts don’t support that–they’re more of a notification system useful for big events, such as AOL getting sold to Verizon or something.
One way to address this issue would be through a form of proximity mapping that would give you shorter summaries of related topics, or that would use collaborative filtering based on your behavior to become smart about what related stories and links to send you.
Another–and this is the OBVIOUS one–would be to make all Google news stories RSS-enabled, like Feedster does with its searches, so users can digest keyword search string results and take it from there–it’s the same technology they’re using now, but delivered in an entirely different way.
So,Google, you listening? How about :
A) Making your news available as RSS feeds with great coding, so they work with most newsreaders
B) Team up with some of the newsreader companies to create a server-side newsreader right on Google (I know the newsreader folks will hate this idea, but it IS inevitable, so live with it…)