The perfect Google News operator
I never use Google News to get news on more than a micro-topic, but I have searches saved in-browser and in-reader that provide niche content (e.g. for certain types of cell phones). For that, it works well. But, Google News would be about 3x more handy if it had a -duplicate operator.
When an AP story crosses the wires, every small town news paper and TV station posts it. My once perfect HTML or RSS listing is now full of 10 identical stories from useless sources. And don’t even mention the fact that every single TV station has an identical looking horrid website. Substitute the anchors and it’s complete boilerplate.
How would this operator work? If it’s a Reuters story, have the link go to Retuers. If it’s AP, pick a major national source (USA Today, Yahoo!, MyWay).
Right now on one of my searches, the first page of results is all one story, and from such great sources as:
- Fort Wayne News Sentinel
- Wilmington Morning Star
- Worcester Telegram
- WTOP
Useless. With -duplicate, it should have one link to a reputable national source and then move on with the other stuff. I have to modify my searches to weed out this stuff, or dig through SERPs to find a national source.
What’s “-duplicate” mean? This post is next to impossible to read. Maybe I just need some sleep. I don’t know. “…micro-topic, but I have searches saved in-browser and in-reader.” What the?
In searches, anything after a minus is read as “without X”. So that would mean, “without duplicate results”. AKA 100 results with the same exact AP copy. It’s useless, I only need to read it once.
But don’t web sites modify it a little for their target readers?
It’s always interesting getting different points of view.
With AP stories, they are exact duplicates. It’s not a matter of being interesting or not, that’s why -duplicate would be an optional modifier. From my point of view, there is no utility of seeing 100 duplicate stories from sources I can’t link to.