News Source: http://www.billhartzer.com
Story Found By: dedmond29 1351 Days ago
Category: Vertical Search
FTA: The Tribune Company, in a press released late today, said that “the confusion surrounding a 2002 Chicago Tribune article on the Internet this past weekend started with the inability of Google’s automated search agent “Googlebot” to differentiate between breaking news and frequently viewed stories on the websites of its newspapers.”
6 Comments
Comments
This is amazing.So, Google has a problem with only one newspaper in the entire world?Am I hearing that robots.txt, html, .htaccess, google web master tools are all innefective when not used?Can anyone else repeat/recreate the problem? Maybe there is a secret server setting in FL.I am sorry that their stock went down unneccesarily. Have a coffee with your banker. He’s feeling the same way.And of course I could be all wrong about all of this. If I am, I blame Google.
hmm... i know insider trading is a crime, but what about boosting stocks you want to buy in the SERPs... hmm.. bad articles for buying, good articles for selling... of course.. people COULD rate the date on the article...but if it was me, i’d blame @brentdpayne... (j/k)
jim.. maybe we could... wait.. nm.. this si a phone call and not something we want to put in writing.. but me thinks.. you know what i am thinking...how can we get my google to go back up to $700/share?
The fact the story was published at 8 different urls was the cause of the issue http://sphinn.com/story/71911Google found a new version of the url and assumed it was a new story. The crap CMS is to blame for the entire fiasco.
@Patrick, I have seen you around the web space. Now I will be looking out for you. Nice work in doing more to surface what happened, rather than simply adding another well meaning opinion here. Do you know which CMS they have been using? Might they be in the market for a new one? hehe
@patrickaltoft - nice breakdown here and I wish I had seen your story before submitting this one as well. I think the key element is why or how did that story get pushed to the "popular stories" section in the first place - as you clearly ask in your post. IMO - the idea that one click could push something to a popular section seems a bit odd.It’s a slippery slope to believe the CMS is exclusively to blame here and I certainly will be looking for more details on this as well. Regardless, glad to see your writing about it also