Is Google Making Us Stupid? … Obviously.
by John Paczkowski
Posted on September 11, 2008 at 8:19 AM PT
Is Google making us stupid?
The answer to that question, recently posed by Nick Carr in The Atlantic, is a resounding yes. At least in the case of Sun Sentinel publisher Tribune.
How else to explain the company’s claim that Google is largely to blame for the six-year-old news story that gutted the United Airlines share price this week?
In a statement issued Wednesday, Tribune (TXA) said that Google’s indexing of the article, “United Airlines Files for Bankruptcy,” on Google News made the story appear new, even though it was originally published on Dec. 10, 2002.
At 1:36:57 a.m. EDT, September 7, (10:36:57 p.m. PDT, September 6), our records show that the Google search agent–known as “Googlebot”–crawled the story on Sun Sentinel’s website. Our records also show that the Google search agent had previously crawled this same story numerous times, including as recently as last week. Shortly after Googlebot crawled the Sun Sentinel site this time, however, a link to the story appeared on Google News, with a date of Sept. 6, 2008, provided by Google. At 1:39:59 a.m. EDT, September 7 (10:39:59 p.m. PDT, September 6), our records show the story on the Sun Sentinel website received its first referral from Google News.
Apparently, sometime Monday morning, the story was made available to subscribers of Bloomberg News.
As we said yesterday, the December 10, 2002, story contains information that would clearly lead a reader to the conclusion that it was related to events in 2002. In addition, the comments posted along with the story are dated 2002. It appears that no one who passed this story along actually bothered to read the story itself.”
Apparently not. Certainly the Income Securities Advisors employee who published the story to the Bloomberg financial news service didn’t. Because if he did, he surely would have noticed the original publication date in the article’s dateline, right?
Wrong. Turns out the article did not have a dateline or an original publication date. There was, however, a date above the article at the top of the Web page on which it appeared: “September 7, 2008.” Add to this the fact that the article had been given eight different URLs and one of them was listed in the most-viewed section of the Sun Sentinel’s Web site and, well … clearly, this was all Google’s fault.
Please.
Publishing a news story at multiple URLs without a proper publication date in the era of search engine optimization, or SEO, seems just a bit irresponsible for a major news organization doesn’t it? Perhaps not as irresponsible as publishing that story to a financial newswire without reading it or, you know, confirming it–but irresponsible nonetheless.
The SEC is looking into the matter.
[Image Credit: blogstorm]
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Comments
Im baffled. How is this not Google’s fault? Its search crawler simply selected a date for an article contained on the Sun Sentinel. While it would be nice if the publication included dates with all their archived articles, it is not required and the date appears if you look for the article through their search engine. This is a non-issue if Google did not go in and give the article its own date. It is VERY common for articles in Google News to be incorrect because of this issue.
Ive been a huge fan of your work for years, but it really seems lately that you have become a Google Fanboy as well as attack Yahoo unfairly. Who cares what Yahoo could have made in stock. It is a Kingpin for online news (number 1 sports and finance sites), email and a boon for blogs with Yahoo Buzz. The only thing Google has done well is search, and its competitors have almost caught up with them there. Yahoo is a strong company that isnt letting stock price dictate their decisions.
Posted by Dominic Pannone at September 11th, 2008 at 1:30 pmDominic ….
If you feel I’m a Google fanboy, you haven’t been reading my work for as long as you claim. Point taken on Yahoo, although I disagree with your assessment of it as a “strong company.”
Now: I’m not saying that Google doesn’t bear some responsibility here; certainly the Google crawler could do a better job of contextual date analysis.
But …
… the Sun Sentinel is a news organization and an important part of any news story is the dateline which explains when (an where) the story was written. For example, the statement Tribune issued Wednesday blaming Google for the incident is datelined: “CHICAGO, Sept 10, 2008.” Got the dateline right on that story, didn’t we?
Now, Tribune argues that the UAL story’s missing dateline is immaterial here because its true publication date was evident contextually to anyone who actually read it. And I suppose that’s true. But to Google’s automated search agent, the only date that mattered here was the only date on the story it was crawling. And the only date on the story it was crawling was September 7, 2008. See for yourself. To reiterate: No date of original publication appeared on the story page on either chicagotribune.com or sunsentinel.com. The only date on those pages was Sept. 7, 2008. In fact, if you go back and look at the article itself (which seems to have been yanked from all Tribune sites) you’ll see that the body of the article doesn’t include any hard dates either. In fact, the only 2002 dates that appear on the story are in a sidebar featuring reader comments.
Ironic, isn’t it, that reader comments (and Tribune press releases) are datelined and the story itself is not?
Posted by John Paczkowski at September 11th, 2008 at 3:21 pmSetting aside, for a moment, the stupidity of this website putting a wrong date on its stories, this is an easy fix. Since not all news sites may report visible dates on their stories, or may report them in a way that spiders may misread them, news organizations can include a meta tag such as this:
Google supports this tag on their Google Mini server; I suspect they support it on their own servers, as well.
For database-driven sites, this should be an easy fix.
Daryl
Posted by Daryl Gibson at September 11th, 2008 at 5:06 pmApparently, the meta tag was screened out when the comment posted. This is a rough-equivalent, without the brackets:
Posted by Daryl Gibson at September 11th, 2008 at 5:08 pmmeta name=”date” content=”2008-09-11T11:10:00-0700″
John
I think I understand a bit better the issue you were looking to address. I may have been a little quick to attack in this case, but feel Google is still getting to much of a free pass overall by the tech media. In a very real sense they are trying to monopolize the internet and impacting many industries without strong criticism (admittedly it is starting to bubble up).
I am a bit of a Tech news junkie and between GMSV and now Digital Daily, your blog has been my first stop for news since ‘05. I really appreciate you taking the time to follow up.
Posted by Dominic Pannone at September 12th, 2008 at 12:10 pm