Radical implications for media on the web only now being understood

World View: When a product becomes a functional verb it has certainly arrived. So it was with hoover and vacuum cleaning, or sellotape and sticky tape. In the last few years the same thing has happened with the internet.

To google now is to search the web, even though there are many other search engines available. Google uses a new technology based on computer algorithms which track the traffic through the website and rank them in order according to content and usage.

The technique has now been applied to online news services. Google News has rapidly become the major source of online news, tracking 4,500 outlets in English continuously, and ordering them according to such criteria as how often they are used and on what sites.

This is done without editorial intervention to decide top placement or judgments of their relevance - although these decisions are made by the individual services drawn on.

The (free) news service has been applied to 20 other languages, including French, Spanish, German, Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

In addition its powerful technology can be used to search all these news outlets for particular subjects and names.

This makes it an indispensable service, for journalists and readers alike, filling a completely new role that was simply not available 10 years ago.

Other companies such as Yahoo or AltaVista have similar searchable facilities, arranged in somewhat different formats (they are reviewed in the news search section in http://searchenginewatch.com/).

Suddenly the world media landscape becomes extraordinarily accessible. We are only beginning to understand the revolutionary implications and potential of this for public deliberation.

Some of the effects have been seen in recent world events, as an alternative web-based media emerged to challenge established ones in the United States on the Iraq war, or in France during the EU constitutional treaty referendum campaign.

One of the pleasures of using Google News is to encounter the sheer diversity of outlets on the web attached to particular stories.

Thus the IRA arms decommissioning story, accessed after midday yesterday, listed the San José Mercury News, the San Francisco Chronicle, Japan Today, CBS News, Zaman Online from Turkey, as well as the Belfast Telegraph, among its top 20 sites listed in chronological order. There were 1,498 outlets in all.

Of course there is much repetition because of the use of news agencies and syndication arrangements.

In the French language section, tracking 500 outlets, Nouvel Observateur, Le Monde, Liberation, Libre Belgique and China's Xinhua agency were similarly listed in 1,640 items about the IRA.

These include alternative or marginal news services as well as mainstream ones. Google executives are concerned that biased or incorrect news stories are being ranked above more quality news. They have filed a patent for a new technology ranking a story by the quality of its source.

The new ranking system will take account of factors such as the average length of an article, an amount of important coverage that the news source produced in a second time period, a breaking news score, a human opinion of the news source, circulation statistics, size of staff, numbers of bureaux, its breadth of coverage and the number of countries from which network traffic to the news source originates.

Alternative outlets in the US that rely on Google News-related traffic are worried that "such a value-laden code would pass judgment on the passive voice" which has previously characterised the service, according to Kelly Hearn, writing for the AlterNet news service (www.alternet.org). She asks whether breadth of coverage criteria will take account of niche-market publications, which often dig deeper into subjects, and which have a proven record as alternative media there.

She quotes Chris Tolles of www.topix.net, a website helping users find targeted news stories with another algorithm technology, who says Google's plan is conservative and "kind of boring". The impulse to check sources and establish authority, while understandable, assumes the source of the story is more important than the event.

The event may be more important than the story for web-based sites working on a 24-hour cycle of breaking news; but reliability and truthfulness remain central values for media and their readers, listeners or viewers, even if the battle to preserve them becomes more and more difficult. The notion that algorithms can rank order news stories without human agency is a piece of touchingly naive scientism, however much diversity they have.

Users of media require more, not less, reliable judgment to surf the mass of information now online. The revolutionary change is in their ready availability. Several of the newer services mentioned here arise from the need to navigate these seas reliably. This is a second-order development marking a transition from older to newer types of knowledge and learning involved in the internet revolution.

Researchers refer to it as a shift from traditional skills based on precious and relatively inaccessible knowledge and learning to a newer style based on its widespread availability, in which there is much more social accountability and reflexivity.

These general changes have a media aspect, but the new media also relate back to more systematic specialised knowledge as they have always done, but in fresh ways.

I came across Kelly Hearn's article on a favourite website, Political Theory Daily Review. Edited by a graduate student in New York, it surveys a huge range of free publications and websites on politics, political theory and philosophy, presenting a daily selection categorised under the headings Newsroom, Town Square and Ivory Tower. It is a must for political wonks.

It may be supplemented usefully by another service, Google Scholar. This searches scholarly literature, peer-reviewed journals, papers, theses, books and reprints with a powerful facility. Often copies can be found on the web rather than in pay sites. This, too, is quite new, giving previously unheard of access to the world of knowledge.