In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times' Web site.

http://www.longbets.org/bet/2

My thesis:
As weblogs are systems of personal expression, and as the New York Times is a source of factual news, the result of this bet will depend on whether subjective commentary is more popular than objective reporting.

Commentary completely unrelated to my thesis:
I say “popular” in my thesis because of the choice of Google as the search engine for this bet. Google’s search technology is far more complicated than what can be described here, so allow me to summarize with a quotation from Google’s Press Center:

“Google interprets a link from Page A to Page B as a ‘vote’ by Page A for Page B. Google assesses a page’s importance by the votes it receives. Google also analyzes the pages that cast the votes. Votes cast by pages that are themselves ‘important’ weigh more heavily and help to make other pages important.”

Of course this is oversimplified, but the relevance is that the winner of the bet will receive more links/votes than the loser. Although one might reasonably guess that nytimes.com holds the advantage here, allow me to describe two highly unscientific searches I recently conducted in the name of research. First, a Google search for “Bush Castro” (no quotation marks) resulted in 137,000 hits, of which I had the patience to sort through the first two hundred. NYTimes.com was not among them, although there were dozens of other news agencies, sites en español, and, yes, weblogs. Thinking that I had been unfairly general, I took a somewhat unique headline from nytimes.com (“Despite a Year of Upheavals, Economic Optimism Is High”), borrowed what I considered to be the significant phrase (“economic optimism”), and plugged it into Google, using quotation marks to link the two terms together. Of 2,930 hits, nytimes.com was #135.

There are many possible flaws in my search, e.g. perhaps the Economic Optimism article had been posted recently and nobody had a chance to link to it yet. Still, I think the results are illuminating: the New York Times may be the colossus that stands astride the print journalism world, but electronically it lags behind The Seattle Times and Yahoo! Italia. Although I am not certain if the two bettors agreed on a definition for the term “weblog”, it is entirely possible that they already outrank nytimes.com for hits, leaving the latter five years to catch up, if it can.

A nice piece of research. Don't think the NY Times guy has a clue! Does he cross the road with his eyes shut as well? Start writing the cheque now.

Interesting development:
New York Times Digital Partners With Google to
Enhance Search Results On NYTimes.com and Boston.com
http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/020806/62226_1.html

I think it will be more interesting to see if Google will be around in five years? Or better yet will we still be searching for information using search engines and keywords?

Google, who knows? [Although I think it's fairly safe]. Search engines on the other hand I'm _certain_ will be with us for a lot longer than 5 years.

"In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times' Web site."

Is that
a) one search for all the keywords / phrases, or
b) a separate search per story?

There are other points that need clearing up, but I think that is the most important. I think weblogs get a big boost if (b) is correct, because the NYT covers a wide range while weblogs tend to be more specialised in their interests.

Considering how Google ranks its pages, i.e. web-site rank is determined by how many other web-sites link to it, I'm wondering if this bet is fair to the New York Times. 'Bloggers' are incestual "hyperlinkers" in-so-far as much of a weblog's content is hyperlinks to other weblogs; conversely, the New York Times does not participate in this phenomenon. To the point weblogs by their very nature have better "Google Karma".

It appears the NYTimes is intentionally trying to loose
this bet since they ban Google from spidering their
pages completely:

http://nytimes.com/robots.txt

Presumably this means that the test will not be made until Jan 1, 2008. I wonder how the 'recentness' of the stories will affect the search ranking ...

What is my own take on this debate? As of now, I don’t have a strong opinion either way.


However, I do know that


1) I get almost all of my news and views from other bloggers or from magazines. I don't read general-purpose newspapers directly any more unless there's an article on a blog or meta-filter site (Google News, Samachar.com etc.,) that cites an article from a particular newspaper.


2) However, while blogging is very addictive, it takes a decent amount of time and effort to bring out a good blog regularly. Most blogs could do with significant editorial and proofreading makeovers. In the absence of any monetary remuneration, I’m not sure how many people will continue to invest the time and energy required to bring out a quality blog.

Yeah, but they only block stories through 2005. By 2007, I'm sure the new ones will be indexed. ;-)

A quote from the bet:

"The pervasive big publishing philosophy of Dumb It Down, forces all stories through too narrow a channel to model the diverse and complex world we live in."

My comment: The idea that more space is good for writing and the thinking behind it is fundamentally flawed. The beauty and value of journalism published on paper is the inescapable reality of limited space. It forces the writer to boil down the points and communicate the essence of the story, followed by pertinent information that answers the key questions asked by most readers.

Readers interested in further exploration have a million places to go, but the discipline of writing under space constraints, not to mention being edited, often fiercely, makes for good writers.

I sometimes have the impression that the NY Times writes long stories intentionally, perhaps giving the readers the impression that they're getting more. Their stories don't all need to be as long as they are.

By the way, I am a print reporter.

I believe that by 2007, the New York Times will still be around, and will be paying Google (and every other "search engine" (the term must already be used loosely)) more per click than weblogs do, specifically so that they (as a commercial enterprise) appear higher in the rankings than weblogs.

But when I see the Times cover areas I am expert in, and miss the point completely, I wonder how well they're informing me in areas where I am a neophyte.
Dave Winer

This is the part of the argument that really resonates with me. Whenever I read, or watch, mainstream news, I find myself avoiding stories about my areas of expertise (software development). It's often just too painful to read. The stories are clearly written by folks who just aren't equipped to provide insightful journalism on technical subjects. They can do little but regurgitate press releases.

Knowing this, I asked several smart friends about it. Turns out, in each of their areas of expertise, they felt that mainstream media coverage was lacking a basic understanding of the subject matter.

I wonder how well they're informing me in areas where I am a neophyte.

In recent news, Google is apparently thinking about separating blogs from other search results.

As such, come 2007, it may not be possible to get the NYT and popular blogs in the same search results..

I think weblogs may be more popular now and then, but I don't believe this bet is very meaningful. The essential point of any newspaper is news. They separate fact from fiction; give us the basics on everything. Personally I turn to news sources for general, quick, accurate information and then search Google when I need more specific information. While I'll believe something if I see it in one or two big news sources, I think it's necessary to get many more confirming sources from weblogs or the like.

Mr. Nisenholtz Is quite right in many of his points, but he should have paid closer attention to the bet itself before putting his money down. As other posters have mentioned, Google ranks pages according to number of incoming links, not journalistic reputation. The bloggers have the advantage in that by far. Unless Google changes it's page ranking policy, *my* money is with the blogs.

Also, I found this bet and this site by reading Stephen B. Johnson's blog and this articlc: http://slate.msn.com/id/2085668/ :)

Marshall McLuhan said it... the medium IS the message.

Search engines and weblogs give anyone with elementary computer skills the ability to reach a broad and unfiltered by Pinch Sulzberger look at the news.

Search engines offer the added advantage of flexibility in presentation - anyone with an eighth-grade grasp of set theory can easily construct Boolean queries to get information on exactly the topic or topics they are curious about, and most news search engines, like Google News, will walk the user through the process of arranging the Web page to continually present those topics on which the user wants to be informed.

In fact, the sheer vista of possible information sources available with a few mouse clicks means (to me, anyway) that teaching even elementary computer skills must take a back seat to teaching elementary logic and epistemiology.

Not only is everyone his own publisher with the Net, but everyone is his own editor - a much more demanding task requiring not only the technical skills of grammar and syntax, but the ability to sift gems of real knowledge from mountains of mere information. Also, a good editor should be able to set his or her ideological biases aside and actively seek the truth.

But returning to the bet, yes, I believe that as long as people like Andrew Sullivan and Matt Drudge are blogging, then the NYT's Web page will shrink to relative insignificance (absent a radical change in the NYT's editorial policy in the direction of the Los Angeles Times, whose managing editor has actually issued a memo to his reporters, editors and writers acknowledging the potential for political bias toward the left in his paper's reporting and mandating objectivity in reporting).

brentrockwood raises an excellent point - for every Judith Miller who is well-wired to excellent primary sources on her topic (bioterrorism and emerging diseases in Miller's case) there are far too many hacks out there who simply use the facts they gather to bolster stale stories or confirm the perceived biases of their editors.

Why? In my admittedly limited exposure to the innards of the working press, it's because the elevation of journalism to a profession with a college curriculum and a specialized degree has actually REDUCED the quality of new journalists. In the old, pre-journalism degree days, reporters learned their trade on the job - and this gave old journalists a lot of range - the bad ones were dismal, while the good ones were superlative - people who knew the subject on which they were reporting and who went to their sources, not their paper's slush pile, in order to get stories.

reed raises a very good point: "Google ranks pages according to number of incoming links, not journalistic reputation."

I ran up against that fact in trying to read about the Iraq War in Google News - apparently the sheer number of people reading editorial essays from Web sites in places like the Phillipines and Singapore causes Google News to rate those pieces and Web sites more highly than, say, stories carried by Reuters or UPI.

This is probably a Good Thing, because it drives the point home to the reader at home that Web news is by no means definitive or even necessarily correct.

As I said in another post in this thread, schools need to start teaching logic and epistemiology. Kids probably can teach themselves how to log on and search, but they must be able to learn about the world around them without being spoon-fed conclusions masquerading as news by The Newspaper of Record (the New York Times), The Weekly Standard or anyone else. The Web is just too good a tool for that sort of thing to NOT be used!

This may be a case where no one wins (or loses, if you like) because the bettors didn't specify the terms well enough. The rules are nothing like as complex as the Turing Bet (Long Bets #1), which even at its high level of specificity may be too imprecise to yield a clear winner. E.g. they don't ever really say what 'biological' means...maybe computers will be biological by then...who knows?

The main problem here is that no one bothered to define weblogs. And the secondary problem is that the way Google displays results has changed. When I searched "Iraq War"--clearly one of the top 5 news stories of 2007 (and it's only January 30), the first thing you see are of course, Google's News results. These results largely exclude blogs, since we haven't yet arrived at a point where blogs are widely considered news.

So do we not count the "News Results" because they're defined to exclude blogs? Or does the fact that blogs aren't in Google's 'News' category bear directly on the bet, which is essentially a prediction that blogs would replace newspapers as the major means of news dissemination?

But wait, newspapers have blogs now, and newspaper blogs would be considered news. And by the same token, some organs that started out as blogs--say, Talking Points Memo--frequently break conventional 'news'. Well if something breaks news, does that mean it's not a blog anymore? Or...if something doesn't print newsprint anymore, does that mean it's not a newspaper? Sheesh.

You guys should've tried to nail these questions down before you threw in your chips, because the language you used in 2002 can be interpreted in too many ways in 2007 for you to get a definite outcome. And don't beat yourself up for leaving out phrases like "as it was understood in 2002" -- because as you've demonstrated--it wasn't really.

Or was it? Maybe we can agree that in 2002 terms, a "Google Search" just meant an Internet-wide application of Google's fundamental incoming-links-based algorithm--not the special add-on doohickeys it's instituted since. Fine, so no Google News. This narrowing of the terms probably wouldn't hold up in a court of law, but maybe reasonable people can accept it as in the spirit of the original bet.

But then what about the 'what is a blog' question? The definition of blogging has expanded (or rather, unraveled) so much since 2002 that it really seems futile to try to pin down what was originally meant. A non-profit, non-professional commentary web-site run by an individual or small group? Please--even back in 2002 there were probably 5,000,000 sites fitting that description that no one would've called blogs.

What about something with 'blog' in the name, or that uses 'blogging' software? How about Huffingtonpost.com--er...is that a blog?

Conceivably, it might not matter either way. When I searched "Iraq War" just now, New York Times was #12 and dailywarnews.blogspot.com, the first blog, was #15. Guess the jury's still out!

I've just googled "Lord Conrad Black" and a New York Times article appeared on rank 12. Above that, there were only two traditional blogs (ie. not written by journalists) ranked 8 and 9. I guess that wouldn't be enough. But the fact that they made it higher than the New York Times is still impressive.

I thought I'd look into this as an impartial observer. Here is the list the Associated Press' top 5 news stories of 2007 http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jn5ezyBjgKHdk7p9Hh79JddC6wvQD8TLBI4G1):

Searching the google main page with each of these terms results in the following:

1. VIRGINIA TECH KILLINGS:
http://www.google.com/search?q=virginia+tech+killings&hl=en&safe=off&start=10&sa=N
There is a definite blog listed as the 16th result. The Times is 24th.

2. MORTGAGE CRISIS
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=mortgage+crisis
The Times is 2nd. First blog is 14th

3. IRAQ WAR
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=iraq+war
I skipped "google news" links. The Times has a link at or about 24th. I didn't see a blog in the first 50 results.

4. OIL PRICES
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=oil+prices
The Times was 19th. The first blog hit was 52nd.

5. CHINESE EXPORTS
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=chinese+exports
A blog appears 17th. The Times was 23rd.

The Times comes out on top in 3 out of 5 searches. Martin wins based on my measurements.

Long Bets has arrived at a decision for Long Bet #2 between blogger Dave Winer and Martin Nisenholtz of the NY Times. At stake is US$2000.00 plus half the interest that has accrued over the last 5 years in the Farsight Fund, all of which will go to the charity of the winner's choice.

In the bet Winer asserts, "In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 02007, weblogs will rank higher than the 'New York Times' Web site". The premise of this bet is excellent, but unfortunately the arguments were quite vague on how to adjudicate the bet. Long Bets encourages bettors to construct arguments that involve the least amount of interpretation possible. Once this bet came up for adjudication we urged both parties to come to their own decision, but they asked Long Bets to be the final arbiter. We have done our best with the information and resources available to us, but this process should be a good instructor both to future bettors and ourselves...

The major questions that affect the interpretation of this bet:
Q: Which list of "2007 top stories" to use?
A: We chose the Associated Press list, as it was the only one suggested by one of the bettors (Nisenholtz), and it was in effect at the time of the bet origination. We found many others, (some listed in the notes below), that may actually be better indices of what a "top story" is, but we felt that the AP list was our best choice for this bet.

Q: What is a weblog? Does Wikipedia count? What about the NY Times blog or other commercial blogs? Does it include any non-commercial user submitted web site?
A: We decided that a weblog had to be something that would have been recognized as a blog in 02002. This includes ad supported blogs and commercial blogs like those of the NY Times. While the bettors argument in this case discusses why non-commercial content will beat out commercial content, Winer never provides a definition of a weblog. As it turns out, including major news source blogs like those of the NY Times or sources like Wikipedia do not affect the ultimate outcome in the case of this bet, but they certainly could have.

Q: What is the NY Times? Does the International Herald Tribune count (which is owned by the NY Times and its content comes from there)?
A: We determined that it had to be on the nytimes.com web site to count. If the bettor wanted subsidiaries or other associated derivative content to count, they should have specified it in their argument. This did affect the outcome of one of the searches where the IHT.com result came in at 9 and blogs came in at 10. This result would not have affected the ultimate decision however.

Some other notes: The bettors also never defined what the search semantics should be, and or what date the searches should occur on. Both of which affect the data a fair amount. We tried the searches in a number of ways and a number of times since AP released their list of stories in December to arrive at our decision. We disregarded any search results that were dated after 12/31/02007 when calculating search rank.

Here are 02007's top stories, as voted by AP Journalists with search rankings (lower is better). We also include results of the highest non-commercial/user submitted content and highest ranked commercial content as a reference.

"VIRGINIA TECH KILLINGS" (NYT score 26, blog 10) winner Blogs
Highest user contributed result: Wikipedia 1
Highest commercial news outlet result: USA Today 2

"MORTGAGE CRISIS" (NYT score 2, blog 10) winner NYT
Highest user contributed result: Wikipedia 1
Highest commercial news outlet result: NYT 2

"IRAQ WAR" (NYT score 24, blog 5,) winner Blogs
Highest user contributed result: Wikipedia 1
Highest commercial news outlet result: CNN 3

"OIL PRICES" (NYT score 172, blog 38) winner Blogs
Highest user contributed result: Monga Bay Blog 38
Highest commercial news outlet result: Bloomberg 1

"CHINESE EXPORTS" (NYT score 57, blog 3) winner Blogs
Highest user contributed result: Blogging Stocks 3
Highest commercial news outlet result: China Today 1

Adding up page rank winners blogs win 4 to 1.
Adding up page rank winners of user submitted content vs. commercial content, user submitted content wins 3-2.
If you average page ranks of the NYT (avg rank 56.2) vs. blogs (avg. rank 13.2) Blogs win.
If you use an average rank of user submitted content (avg. rank 8.8) vs. commercial (avg. rank 1.8) Commercial news outlets win.

The Long Bets decision on this bet is in favor of Winer's side, weblog page ranks came out ahead of the NY Times. We will be calculating interest and sending a check on to Dave Winer's charity of choice the World Wide Web Consortium in the next month.


Notes:
Aside from the observation that Wikipedia often ranks very high and was not really considered at the time of this bet in 02002, another interesting note was how well government sites ranked in subjects like oil prices, Chinese exports, and others. The government sites are often listed in the top ten of these types of subjects showing that people are also turning to the government websites for authority.

The other interesting thing to us was how much the bettors own definitions (or lack there of in this case) affected the bet. For instance had the bet been structured around commercial vs non-commercial content, and they had chosen an average ranking system (which actually seems to answer teh question being asked more clearly), commercial content would have won by a factor of more than four.

Also of note is that with a slightly different analysis Rogers Cadenhead did come up with the same winning results based on page rank over at his blog Work Bench.

For reference here are some other "Top Stories of 2007" lists that could have been considered. Testing the first two of these lists yielded results similar to the AP list.

Pew's Project for Excellence in Journalism’s News Coverage and Interest Indexes.

Time Magazine

About.com

Foreign Policy, top 10 stories missed in 2007

CNN (not ranked - chronological)

MSNBC graph showing top story of the day, for the year (most clicked)

Telegraph UK Top read stories of 2007, by category

Crikey's Top Ten List


Doctors Without Borders (top *underreported* humanitarian stories):

BBC News (most popular)

Yahoo! News (most emailed)