Dim your lights, I can see you for miles
Feb 25th, 2010 by handolio
At work, we’re writing a couple of motoring news feeds for an insurance client. It’s not journalism red in tooth and claw, but they’re nice people and we quite enjoy trying to give them a couple of properly researched, written and edited news stories every day. To their credit, that’s what they want.
We use Google News among our sources. I’ve written before of my concerns regarding its apparent lack of judgement, but I still find it useful – particularly its new(ish) custom section feature.
Recently its results have begun to include the peculiarly car-headlight-bulb-focused Autobulbs Direct News, providing such fetishistic takes on motoring news as:
Bentley launches new vehicle, with gloss black finished car light casings
and
Car lights of Spyker supercars to be fitted in Coventry (where, in fact, the whole cars are to be assembled).
We’ve seen this kind of deal before: take a press release, rewrite it, crowbar in the term you’re trying to optimise for, publish and submit to Google News. Even so, a recent story went too far, mis-attributing a focus on headlights to a Virgin Money spokesman:
[Grant Bather] suggested that this could include cracked car lights or other damage caused in a traffic accident or claims that result from breakdowns or theft.
This is just naughty. There’s no mention of headlights in Bather’s quotes, or indeed anywhere else in the Virgin release.
Taken in isolation, tucked away in a news feed that’s written for Google, perhaps this kind of search-term loading hardly matters, but it depresses me all the same. I expected Google to become more wise than it was in 2007 to the quality of the news it aggregates.
Back then, in a few months of optimism, it was tempting for Charlie and I to believe that we were part of a potential new direction for journalism. Like us, we assumed, other journalists would want to maintain decent standards when writing news for the websites of corporate clients, and that Google would help by favouring those who bothered.
For me, our two motoring news feeds are all that remains of that belief.
