...don't even ignore 'em.
-- Samuel Goldwyn

Wednesday, December 01, 2004

Google Oops

Yesterday afternoon, Google News (beta) , the untouched-by-human-hands Web news site, led with stories about GW Bush's Canada visit. But the story that topped GN's list was "Canadians [sic] Authorities Arrest U.S. President Bush On War Charges" on a site called Axis of Logic.

Holy crap! What reader wouldn't click on that? Only when doing so did I discover the bold headline above the story at AxofLog (AOL?!)-- "POLITICAL SATIRE".

Looks like the Googs tweaked the fine tuning a bit much. The usual Web avalanche ensued. Axis has added a disclaimer today. A ringing endorsement of human editing, no?

Follow-up: The googly story stacking disappeared quickly, naturally. And today I tried to find the arrest satire via Google News Search and it was nowhere, four pages into the search results (Sorry, I don't have enough life left to drill further).

As a crazy IT geek I worked with said more than once, "Computers don't work." Keep this in mind when believing Web news sources, O.K.?

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