Nature reports in News this week (453, 1149; 26 June 2008) that a Canadian graduate student dissatisfied with science coverage on online sites such as Google News and Yahoo News has created a news aggregator especially for scientists.

Michael Imbeault, an HIV researcher at the Université Laval in Quebec, launched his fully automated site called e! Science News last month. It has already attracted 300,000 different users, and averages 5,000 visits a day, he says.

News aggregators display headlines and snippets from other media sources, but don’t produce their own content. Of the top five online US news sites, three are aggregators — Google News, AOL News and Yahoo News — and only two — CNN.com and MSNBC.com — generate original content. Yahoo and AOL use human editors and source almost all science stories from wire agencies, such as Reuters. Google News uses computer algorithms to aggregate headlines from thousands of news sources, ranking them by how often and on which sites stories appear. Science and technology coverage on Google News, for example, is notoriously devoid of basic science.

The above is taken from the Nature News story, where more information can be found.