Google's Solution

When Google has a problem, their solution is to write software. As a Software Engineer, I can definitely appreciate that. Many people have been lambasting Google lately because their Google News service uses sources that some find objectionable. Many have in fact called for Google to remove those sites from its news aggregator service. I argued recently that they should in fact do no such thing. Not that Google took my advice, but they've decided against that approach, and instead are going to use Trust Rank (H/T Slashdot):

Now Google, whose name has become synonymous with internet searching, plans to build a database that will compare the track record and credibility of all news sources around the world, and adjust the ranking of any search results accordingly.

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.

Personally I find this solution to be very satisfying... as it doesn't use some sort arbitrary (and opinion driven) means to determine what is a valid news source and what is not. It uses practical, measurable criteria to determine a trustworthy news source. Frankly I'm not surprised that they would come up with something like this at all... I'll be interested to see how it turns out.