Friday, March 26, 2010

What The Heck Is This Doing In The Sports News?

I love Google News. It's a fabulous news aggregator. It would be nice to be able to pick a little more than just the Australian news stories as I would like to add a few English Premier League articles. NBA results wouldn't go astray either. But I digress.

I understand that no human involvement, apart from coding the algorithm originally, takes place. Here's how Google News works, according to Google. It basically looks for popular stories and puts them together in a collection.

I read the sports and business sections regularly. Today I was quite surprised to see President Obama as the top sports story. How the heck did that happen? His health care story has nothing to do with sport. I can only think that the big high-five resembles a basketballer's celebration but you'd have to admit that it's a long bow to draw.

What about the third most popular story? Obviously the golf club is sports-related but the article is about an attack with a claw hammer. It took place in the guy's driveway, not a driving range.

Time for the algorithm to be updated, methinks.

What the heck is this doing in the sports news?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Those bastards goofed!!!