Monday, July 12, 2004

News.com Extra: Filtered by humans

CNet recently launched a general news site called News.com Extra. The tagline is "The Web filtered by humans, not bots," an amusing dig at news aggregators like Google News.

Of course, the tagline is absurd, implying equivalence where there is none. It's simply not possible to manually filter the hundreds of thousands of articles spidered daily by a news aggregator like Google News. Where an automated process can take advantage of the full breadth of news sources available, human editors will only have time to review and choose from a negligible fraction of the content available. The two are in no way equivalent products.

Not to mention that, if you want a news front page personalized to your interests, it can't be done using human editors.

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