corrente

We certainly hope it's not bias—though some human at Google-owned blogger shamelessly pimping for the winger Mighty Wurlitzer (back) might give us pause.

The US Annenberg Online Journalism Review has a reasonable hypothesis:

Despite those predictable flaws, it's been puzzling to read Google News' takes on John Kerry and George W. Bush over the past month.

n addition to mainstream news outlets from both sides of the political fence (say, NPR and The Washington Post on the left and The Washington Times and New York Post on the right), there were 34 anti-Kerry screeds from the second-tier websites. There was only one pro-Kerry item, from CommonDreams.org.

Far from an isolated example, the pattern has repeated itself throughout the past month. Small conservative Web sites such as Useless-Knowledge, Men's News Daily, Michnews and ChronWatch turn up in disproportionate numbers when clicking on news about John Kerry. Useless-Knowledge, for instance, made up 12 of the first 100 results for John Kerry on Friday, and 11 of the first 100 results Saturday.

By contrast, a search on George Bush or George W. Bush typically results in a fairly neutral, evenly balanced set of results from both sides of the political spectrum, with many of the same small conservative sites showing up to sing the president's praises.

What's going on? Have Google's search results been hijacked by Fox News?

"I think what you're seeing is an odd little linguistic artifact," said Zuckerman, former vice president of Tripod.com and now a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society who studies search engines. The chief culprit, he theorized, is that mainstream news publications refer to the senator on second reference as Kerry, while alternative news sites often use the phrase "John Kerry" multiple times, for effect or derision. To Google News' eye, that's a more exact search result.

A second possible factor, Zuckerman said, is that small, alternative news sites have no hesitancy about using "John Kerry" in a headline, while most mainstream news sites eschew first names in headlines. The inadvertent result is that the smaller sites score better results with the search engines.

"You have to wonder why some of these wacky sites make the cut," he added. With an occasional exception, Weblogs are generally not found among the Google News results, so Zuckerman had some advice for aspiring political publishers who want to game the search engines: Don't blog -- start an alternative news network. Use terms like George Bush and John Kerry frequently, rather than their last names alone, in both your text and headlines. Publish new works frequently.

What Zuckerman calls gaming the system, others call optimizing your site.
(Online Journalism Review via Talking Points Memo)

Interesting.

Isn't this another way of saying "Don't mourn, organize"?

And isn't there one other factor? It's an awful lot easier to set up a network when you're funded. And as we know, there's been a lot of funding in the past for winger networks doing meme transmittal. $300 million worth...

We need an equalizer, don't we?