Dan East

It appears the CAPTCHA used to keep spam comments out of my blog was broken, which prevented any commenting at all.  Oops.  Well, that explains the total dearth of comments for the last several months.

My son and daughter both got new DS Lites for Christmas. We purchased Nerf Armor for them both, knowing that they would be heavily used and dropped often. Well, around two months ago, my son dropped his DS, while it was open, onto solid concrete. One quick glance at it was all it took to get that sinking feeling in my stomach – the top LCD panel was toast. A crack ran diagonally from one corner to the other, and only a sliver of screen at the bottom actually rendered pixels. The Nerf Armor didn’t save it, but the fact that the screen was open when it was dropped was probably the main reason it was damaged.

So I began searching for replacement LCD panels. Having done quite a bit of electronic repairs in the past, I decided I would try swapping out the panels myself. I found some at various online retailers for $40-$50, but most were out of stock, and all were priced too high. By the time I would pay shipping and buy the special screwdriver required to open a NDS Lite, I would have had $70 in parts just to attempt a repair on a $129 product. So my son made due with only the bottom screen for a few weeks (hopefully that served as a good lesson in being extra careful with expensive electronic devices). I eventually started looking for LCD panels again, and found one for sale on eBay for $4.98. Yes, you read right. $4.98 USD, with $10 shipping from Hong Kong. I read through the user’s feedback, and it was good, however I learned the shipping would take around two weeks, and that buyers received no communication from the seller at all. So a couple clicks of the mouse, and less than 10 days later the new LCD panel arrived (didn’t receive one single email from the seller as expected).

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I’ve been using Google News (news.google.com) for a couple years now as my primary site to keep up with the news. Basically what Google News does is crawl hundreds of news sites and group their articles by topic. So for example, if there was a large earthquake, Google News would “feature” a news story from one of the news sites by using the headline and introductory sentences from the selected article. Underneath that it would list the headlines from two additional articles from other news sites covering the same event, followed by just the names of four other sites covering the story. At the bottom of the entry is a link that will list every article that falls under that category, which is a collection of hundreds to thousands of articles.

Now as much as I like Google News, which enables me to quickly jump to numerous articles about a single topic, allowing me to absorb more information and viewpoints, it is not without its faults. So here they are – nine problems I encounter with Google News on a regular basis.

1. Biased stories. With fairly regular frequency, stories with extreme bias are featured. These are articles spinning the story in an outright false way. This is one of my biggest issues with Google News – it sometimes provides exposure to an “article” that doesn’t adhere to journalistic standards in even the loosest sense. Often these are blog entries and not actual news articles.  Here’s the main headlining Entertainment story from April 20, 2008, taken from the site “hecklerspray”: Sandra Bullock Almost Killed To Death By Drugged-Up Driver, “Nineties heartthrob Sandra Bullock has narrowly escaped death after her car was hit by a drug-crazed female driver. “  Now, besides the terrible grammar in the headline, the article bends the truth.  No-one one was injured in this accident, so how was it she was almost “Killed to Death”?  Also check out the “drug-crazed” female driver.  Nothing like a little colorful adjectives to spice things up.  The funny thing is the driver was intoxicated on alcohol, not drugs, and that article even mentions the fact further on down.  Yet anyone reading just the headlines on Google News would have a completely wrong impression of what happened.  How in the world did a site like “hecklerspray” get on Google’s list of sites to retrieve news from?
2. Broken links. At least weekly I click on a Google News link only to find that the webpage is no longer available at the news site.
3. Dated articles. This is a very substantial problem with Google News, and is best illustrated with an example. Say a prominent murder has occurred, and later in the day they catch the murderer. Google News will still display news stories from a few hours earlier with as much preference as newer stories. Even though the initial articles are only a matter of hours older, they are light years behind since they were written before additional news broke. This problem is exacerbated when a dated article is the headline for the topic, and the headline contains incorrect or grossly out of date information.
4. Spoilers. Do you watch reality shows like American Idol or Survivor? If you do, and happen to miss an episode where someone is voted off, then you’d better stay away from Google News. Twice in as many weeks the American Idol vote off results were spoiled for me by Google News headlines. Today’s main headline under Entertainment was American Idol: It’s over for Amanda. Well, that pretty much let that cat out of the bag.
5. Off-topic text. On occasion Google will grab text from a news site that is not part of the actual article text – often this is text from an error message or other information on the page unrelated to the specific article. I’ve seen text under a headline read “The page you are looking for cannot be found”. Just today the headlining article for all of Google News was from The Washington Post and was entitled An Antiwar Blockade Amid the Apathy Armada. The descriptive text under the headline, which is supposed to give a summary of what the cryptic headline is about, read “Comments that include profanity or personal attacks or other inappropriate comments or material will be removed from the site.” So for some reason Google grabbed part of the Post’s policies for posting comments as the summary for the article.
6. Loosely related articles. Often, Google will group together many articles that aren’t related to the headline. Here are some examples from a couple days ago:
   • Two completely unrelated news stories were happening at once regarding Heathrow airport in Britain. One was that the airport opened a new terminal. The other was that a man ran out onto a runway carrying a couple bags – a huge breach of security. So this was the headline from the featured article, “Man charged over Heathrow security alert”. The two stories under that covered completely different news events; “Heathrow Opens New Terminal” and “Queen opens Heathrow Terminal 5″.
   • There was a headline about a specific video game release “Microsoft Bullish Ahead of GTA IV Release”. Under that topic were two completely unrelated articles discussing how the Nintendo DS is the number one selling game console.
7. Foreign news sources. When there is a story about a shooting in Missouri, I don’t want to read about it third-hand from a news site like the BBC in Britain or Al Jazeera in the Middle East. Conversely, if there is a story breaking in France, I don’t want to visit the local CBS affiliate TV news station in Boise Idaho, just to see their copy / paste of the Associated Press’ article. So I usually have to do a little extra digging to find a news source geographically close to the news story. The local news organizations will always have the most detail regarding news happening in their backyard. It would be nice if Google News would consider this fact when ranking stories.
8. Registration Required. Some news sites only allow registered users to view their stories. Some are subscription-only services that you must pay for. I don’t want to have to register to view an article, and I can’t think of any news content remotely interesting enough for me to justify paying to read it. So I would rather Google News not include results that are not publicly available, yet it does not provide such an option.
9. Pictures. Just as Google News uses headlines and summaries from news sites, it likewise utilizes their images. This is one of the most buggy parts of Google News, which is understandable, as the software algorithm would not be able to draw any meaning from the picture image itself. Thus it is commonplace to see pictures next to topics that are totally irrelevant. In fact, the images are often so unrelated to the news story that they are comedic.

Experts-Exchange is a website where people pose questions they require a solution to. Questions are usually of a technical nature, and have to do with topics like software development, website design, and other similar areas. In turn, “experts” will proffer up answers which the asker may accept or ignore. If a solution is accepted, the asker is charged points, and conversely, the person providing the answer is awarded points. Moderators may force acceptance of a solution if they deem it sufficiently answered the question.

I have never formally used Experts-Exchange, in that I have submitted neither questions nor answers. However, in my searching during a typical workday I will usually encounter Google search results referencing Experts-Exchange. I normally avoid these results for a number of reasons. Questions do not always have good answers; often people post haphazard answers just to earn potential points. In fact, questions may not have any answers at all. But most importantly, Experts-Exchange will not show you the text of the answers. So even though someone already paid points (often via real cash) to have the question answered, they expect every other person to also pay (not points but hard cash) for a Premium Account to see those “solutions”. This is rather unfair, considering that the “experts” that provided solutions do not even get reimbursed points for providing solutions to all these additional people, although the site itself receives actual monetary compensation for them.

So although I normally skip over results from Experts-Exchange, there are occasions when I am searching for something so obscure that I must look at all the results to find what I’m seeking. In that case I use a simple little trick to see what solutions were posted to Experts-Exchange – I use Google’s cache. You see, when Google’s web crawler bot visits Experts-Exchange, their website will display the full text of all answers to Google. That way all the text in those answers will be indexed by Google, which vastly increases the chances of seeing an Experts-Exchange page in the Google results. Google, in turn, saves a copy of each webpage it visits, which is called caching.

So if you are searching Google and come across results at Experts-Exchange that you want to view, simply click on the link that says “Cached” at the bottom of the search result, and you will see the full text of the page, answers included.

I use Wikipedia quite a bit. When I search the internet for information on a topic, I click on the Wikipedia results first, because typically I’ll find everything I need to know on that single web page. Granted, most of the information I seek is for my personal curiosity – I am not researching for a paper, I do not require reliable, quotable sources, and if I consume inaccurate or blatantly false information the results are negligible. The success of Wikipedia in some areas is what makes its dismal failure in others so bitter. As an editor who has contributed nearly 2,000 edits since 2004, I think I have a pretty good grasp of the reality of Wikipedia.

Before I continue, you do know what Wikipedia is, don’t you? It is an encyclopedia containing over 2 million articles written completely by volunteers – and that’s just the English version. Anyone can edit any article – that’s the whole novelty to Wikipedia. You don’t even need to create an account or register (unless an article has been protected, in which case new users cannot edit it). Since Wikipedia is written by any and every one, there are a few things you can count on:

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