Google News Spotlight: could an algorithm detect quality?

The selections of articles are from the last ten days or so but have not been updated in the last three days. The nineteen stories in the US section today include a couple from the New York Times and two more from NYT's blogs, two from CNN and from the New Yorker, and a couple from Fox. The UK version has one of the same New Yorker pieces, one New York Times piece but is otherwise dominated by the Times, Telegraph and Guardian: all unsurprising.

Both country sites include a celebrity story which might not generally be considered to have "enduring appeal," and the US version shows one from well-known satirical paper The Onion. Telegraph journalist Shane Richmond found a similarly odd selection when he studied Spotlight. He sees the new section as Google's attempt to embrace serendipity.

The algorithm by which the stories are chosen is secret, but Nieman Lab's Zachary M. Seward believes that the service "seems to be searching for better clues that point to quality content." The inclusion of celebrity gossip suggests that the algorithm may well need tweaking if this is so, but it is interesting to speculate: is there a way to automatically track down 'quality'? If so, what implications could this have for news search in the future?

Source: Google News, Nieman Lab, Telegraph, Search Engine Land