New Scientist article shares more of the Trust Rank formula and how it might be applied to Google News:

The database will be built by continually monitoring the number of stories from all news sources, along with average story length, number with bylines, and number of the bureaux cited, along with how long they have been in business. Google’s database will also keep track of the number of staff a news source employs, the volume of internet traffic to its website and the number of countries accessing the site.

Ahh, so maybe this is why Google News has never left beta. Makes sense. This could give a good boost to websites that focus on quality and don’t try to play a bunch of games with SE optimization.

When the spiders start seeing sites with domains like insert-keyword-here-and-here-and-here.com, they should choose another site in its place because very few of those sites are ever of any quality. It’s one thing to have filenames that are representative of the content but quite another to register or start keyword-loaded domains (blogger anybody?).