News of quality

New Scientist reported last week that Google has patented technology
to bolster news searches by ranking articles according to the "quality" of their source:

The database will be built by continually monitoring the number of stories from all news sources, along with average story length, number with bylines, and number of the bureaux cited, along with how long they have been in business. Google's database will also keep track of the number of staff a news source employs, the volume of internet traffic to its website and the number of countries accessing the site.

Google will take all these parameters, weight them according to formulae it is constructing, and distil them down to create a single value. This number will then be used to rank the results of any news search.

(Pardon the odd spellings in that passage; they're British.)

Sounds good -- but Mitch Wagner points out that this methodology will actually make Google News' inherent problems worse:

Google News rewards news sources that do the same story that everybody else is doing, at about the same time. This new algorithm, if implemented, will just make the matter worse, by weighting Google News toward the big, corporate media, like the New York Times, CNN, and Fox News, and making it harder for small independent news sources to find an audience.