Goggle News: predominant choices of news sources

August 02, 2004
From More Than 4,500 Sources, Just a Dozen Account for Most Google News Stories?
For some unofficial Web sites that we're launching at several eastern U.S. universities this autumn, we had to find feeds of unusual categories of news stories, the quirky types of stories that are popular on campus. Our initial inclination was Google News, but we analyzed it and were surprised by its predominant choices of news sources.

Although Google spiders more than 4,500 news sources, only about dozen account for the vast majority of stories on Google News. And two of those dozen predominant sources are owned and operated by the U.S. and Chinese governments.

For instance, here is an analysis of the sources of the top two stories on the main Google News page one day last month:

Reuters 175 stories 18% of all
New York Times 80 stories 8% of all
Voice of America 67 stories 7% of all
Xinhua 67 stories 7% of all
Bloomberg 61 stories 6% of all
Washington Post 61 stories 6% of all
ABC News 49 stories 5% of all
Boston Globe 26 stories 2% of all
CNN 22 stories 2% of all
San Francisco Chronicle 17 stories 1% of all
CNN International 17 stories 1% of all
Christian Science Monitor 15 stories 1% of all
Toronto Star 13 stories 1% of all
Seattle Post Intelligencer 13 stories 1% of all
United Press International 12 stories 1% of all
USA Today 10 stories 1% of all
Houston Chronicle 10 stories 1% of all
FOX News 10 stories 1% of all
Newsday 10 stories 1% of all
The Globe and Mail 9 stories 0% of all

top 5 sources are 48%
top 10 sources are 66%
top 25 sources are 83%
top 100 sources are 98%

From more than 4,500 sources, is it possible that 48 percent of stories should be coming from only five sources? Or that Xinhua and the Voice of America, official news sources respectively of the Peoples' Republic of China and the United States of America, are the third and fourth most prevelant sources of Google News? All that doesn't seem plausible, but the data shows that is how Google News is operating.

The situation isn't that much better when all of Google News' categorical news pages (top stories plus all 8 of the news sections) are analysed. For instance, here's a typical snapshot:


Reuters 1058 stories 8% of all
New York Times 646 stories 5% of all
Xinhua 482 stories 3% of all
Washington Post 469 stories 3% of all
Voice of America 396 stories 3% of all
ABC News 373 stories 3% of all
Bloomberg.com 322 stories 2% of all
Reuters.co.uk 278 stories 2% of all
FT.com 242 stories 1% of all
Boston.com 240 stories 1% of all
USAToday 203 stories 1% of all
International Herald Tribune 180 stories 1% of all
Forbes.com 173 stories 1% of all
SFGate.com 157 stories 1% of all
Newsday.com 145 stories 1% of all
TheStar.com 139 stories 1% of all
CNN 138 stories 1% of all
Seattle Post-Intelligencer 137 stories 1% of all
Guardian.co.uk 132 stories 1% of all
Houston Chronicle 125 stories 1% of all

top 100 sources are 80%
top 25 sources are 54%

Sources might shift position in those rankings as news changes day by day, but not by all that much and the top 25 tend to stay in the top 25 of Google News.