Could a favorite of ours, the Google “newsbot,” pay too much attention to humans with PR agendas? From the Register:
Google turns News ‘bug’ into payola feature
By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco
Posted: 09/04/2003 at 21:14 GMTGoogle’s semantic redefinition of the word “News” could soon prove a lucrative bonus for the secretive search engine company.
Why secretive? The company refuses to publish its News Policy – and it maintains the fiction that the selection and composition of stories on its “News section” was “determined by a computer”. That’s as true as the assertion that the selection and composition of the story you’re reading now was “determined by a computer”, too.
As we exclusively confirmed on Friday, Google Inc. has begun treating press releases as news.
The TeleRead take: Another argument for librarian-run search engines to augment the commercial variety?
