In the battle for news-portal supremacy, the great differentiator between Google News and Yahoo! News is editorial methodology. Specifically, Google News culls articles in an automated process, while Yahoo! News uses human editors to decide on its lineup of headlines. Just two weeks ago a Yahoo! product manager asked me to blog an entry on this very distinction. (Another differentiator is how the two services are packaged; Yahoo! licenses its sources for bundling into Yahoo!'s look-and-feel, whereas Google simply deep-links directly to the source page. But that difference doesn't concern me right now.)

For at least two years I have drifted farther away from Yahoo! News toward Google News, largely because I don't think Yahoo!'s editors do a good job selecting stories. In the Digital Music Full Coverage section, for example, the immediacy and comprehensiveness of headlines is consistently inferior. Certainly, blogs do a far better job, as do many large news aggregators such as Topix.net. In Yahoo!, you can count on mind-numbing repetition of stories, so that major news is covered by a half-dozen nearly identical articles from the wire services, which represent Yahoo!'s most prolific sources. I scan Yahoo!'s Digital Music RSS feed every morning, but I have long stopped hoping to find breaking news there, or interesting sources of current news.

New I see this thing—a piece from Forbes.com called The Good Old Days, which, astonishingly, is about an antique Singer sewing machine and past-generation manufacturing methods. Yes, in the Digital Music RSS feed. Why? No doubt because the piece makes an offhand reference to the phrase "iPod docking stations." That was enough to toss the article into the feed like a drop of oil in a stream of water. Note to Yahoo!: If you're going to humanize your news selection, make sure your RSS feeds convey the same human touch. Inept automation doesn't suit you.