Here’s an image to mull upon.
That’s the Google News Australia home-page
“science” category at the moment. At the time, about 6pm AEST – several hours
after the Mars Curiosity touched down (wow. Just wow.) – Google hadn’t got around to promoting that above
the Olympics in Australia.
(A few minutes after Curiosity out-ranked
the Olympics, it fell again. Either we’re depressing, or Google News is.)
Oddly, over on “Classic” view, it isn’t
just the presentation that changes – so do the stories.
Yes, I realize that there’s a top-of-page
section about Curiosity* - but why the hell is a group of acpoaclyptians (it’s
a word now, OK?) classified as
“Science” in the first place? (*Spelling – because Curiosity is an American
venture)
There is absolutely, utterly,
one-hundred-percent of number-twenty-seven nothing
about that story that qualifies it as Science, except for the arcane mysteries
of the Google ranking algorithm.
Oh well. We’re luckier than Americans, who
right now aren’t being offered a Science category at all. What a depressing
thought.
(By the way: it’s not some quirk of my
Google News personalization. I haven’t yet bothered to personalize: no particular reason, I'm just lazy.)
No comments:
Post a Comment