For this part of the assignment, I had a hard time choosing a Google product to try out because I didn't know how they worked! It seemed like they all wanted me to download something (which is next to impossible on a CPL computer, coupled with the fact that I'm terrible at it). Not having the patience to figure this out, I abandoned several interesting options, such as the 3D thing, Google Earth, and Google Trends.
Finally, I picked a boring sounding one: Google News. And I was surprised to find... not so boring! It was neat that it categorized subjects together with articles from all over the world. It was like having a super newspaper. Now I'm intrigued, so I read the "about Google news" section to find out how they are doing this. At first glance it sounds great, stating:
"Our articles are selected and ranked by computers that evaluate, among other things, how often and on what sites a story appears online. As a result, stories are sorted without regard to political viewpoint or idealogy and you can choose from a wide variety or perspectives on any given story".
Sounds great, doesn't it? No regard to politics or idealogy. We get to choose from this wide variety of perspectives. Great.
Except.
The way that google chooses the stories is by how often it appears or is linked online, which essentially means that only mainstream media will be pulled from. And with the media ownership world getting smaller and smaller, this so called variety of perspectives isn't as "wide" as they claim. And though I'm sure they mean well, and it's the system that they're drawing from that's broken, they're claims become false.
But aside from that... I thought it was a very convenient tool for a quick catch up on the days events. I just couldn't recommend it for anything meaningful.
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