Google News Faux Pas by Barbora Kasparova

Google News is having some troubles matching its stories with the right kind of pictures. A random photo mismatching could lead to a rather interesting coincidence, or, I dare say, may almost suggest an intention. The Google News provides news gathered from different news web sites, and "the stated information from Google is that it watches more than 4,500 English-language news sites" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_news). The current trouble they're having seems to be connected in particular to the news coming from Reuters, as mainly photos coming from this news service were concerned. Google representatives say it is out of question that a human error is involved; on the contrary, they put all the blame for the issue on their algorithms and computers. However, a curious mismatching raised a question of a hacker involved, when it was the story on the departure of the chief executive of Time Warner Inc. the algorithms played their tricks on. Article about Richard Parsons, an African American, was accompanied by a picture of a Rhesus Macaque, a species of monkey. Newsweek magazine on its website thus raised a speculation of "an unstoppable racist hacker?" (http://www.newsweek.com/id/67590/page/1). Not a nice reputation for Google news, is it? No wonder they claim they're working to solve the problem as soon as possible. Until then, let's wait for more curious jokes of their algorithms.

related story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071103/ap_on_hi_te/google_news_glitch;_ylt=Ai4__.WnsQRsW_lSOk9ZW6es0NUE

by Barbora Kasparova for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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