Google news update- Spam vs. Relevance

Today Google News launched an update to the service that included a "detail" page that organized salient sources with enhanced content such as photos, timelines, and quotes. I love Google news, but not sure if I like this addition. I use Google news regularly and I find this new update confusing.  

TechCurnch said its an issue with the algorithm and went on to compare TechMeme with Google news. As a geek that plays with document clustering in more than one domain I don't think its a pure algo issue. The issue seems to be primarily around filtering the spam (or including stories that are less "authentic" - but still very strongly related - do you see the difference?). But that's a problem that can be solved easily in a number of different ways (of course the easiest way is to follow Techmeme's approach where you crawl only a known set of sources). But I must admit that I'm surprised to see that the Google QA teams let this slip through. I also still don't get why the detail page contains grouping of news based on the location. Any ideas on why that is being done?

Overall, I think this release is a bit of a disappointment, but hey, its still a great way to browse news on the web, especially in mother tongue telugu!

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