Philipp,

VERY cool ... yea, will be interesting to see how the "wisdom of the masses" plays out in picking the most popular storries ... although per your post above about Google versus Government, even the "reputable" news sources get it wrong.

alek

my page doesn't show "Recommended" but it does have "popular"

Mine doesn't either. It could be becuase we don't have enough saved news history to generate the recommended section, much like if you don't have enough search history you can't get the personalised search results.

Update: You need to activate the Personalized Search history to see the “Recommended” category. Log in to your Google Account, go to Google.com, click on “Search History”, and in your settings (the yellow box on top) click “Resume.”

They're running out of colours. :)

on my google page i can not see recommended ... maybe it's disabled

Chris, did you enable the Personalized Search history?

"In a certain way, it's digg for Google News."

Having used both the "popular" and "recommended" sections of google news, I'd say it's more like "reddit for Google News" – to my knowledge, digg has neither the "recommended" section nor the diversity of topics (only tech) that http://reddit.com has.

Karl, what I meant was that the Google News "Recommended" section looks at what stories people like, and the most popular ones turn up on top. In that way, it's a similar "social voting" behavior like on digg. Of course, it's by far not *exactly* the same. E.g. you don't really vote on Google News, because following a link is not a vote, etc.