Google News for Geeks

No, I don’t know if such a thing exists yet — I’m just saying it would be cool if it did.

Here’s the idea — I’m sure everyone has had a look at Google news. Now that they [[http://news.google.com/intl/en_us/news_feed_terms.html|have feeds]] too, its ultra cool — it helped me get rid of a whole block of feeds from my aggregator.

However, there’s still a large chunk that Google news doesn’t cover well — the geeky news sites. Sure it indexes Slashdot (and probably others too), but the appearance of stories in Google news is heavily influenced by where they appear in other news sites. So for instance, if a story appears in the NYTimes, the Financial Times, and Slashdot, then it usually (or seems to) have a better chance of appearning in Google news, than suppose it appeared only on Slashdot and LWN.net

Google news for geeks would be just like Google news, except that it would index and collate related stories from a restricted subset of sources. Here’s an initial (but not exhaustive list):

* Slashdot
* Arstechnica
* Wired
* LWN.net
* Newsforge
* O’Reilly Radar
* Planet Debian
* Planet KDE
* Planet GNOME
* OSDir.com
* OSNews
* Kerneltrap

Someone at Google please take this up for your 20% project ;-)