From the blog: "Achieving all this through an algorithm is, of course, approximately one thousand percent more complicated than it sounds. For one thing, there's the tricky balance of temporality and authority. How do you deal, for example, with a piece of news analysis that is incredibly authoritative about a particular story without being, in the algorithmic sense, "fresh"? How do you balance personal relevance with universal? How do you determine what counts as a "news site" in the first place? How do you account for irony and cheekiness in a headline? How do you accommodate news coverage's increasing emphasis on the update as its own form of news narrative? Andre Rohe, Google News's head of engineering, summed up the challenge: "How do I take a story that has 20,000 articles, potentially, and showcase all of its variety and breadth to the user?"" Read more
