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July 21, 2007

Maybe Google News Needs A Little Tweaking

Michael Arrington

34 comments »

An interesting story came across my desk today - A “news” site called Axcess News reported that President Bush was undergoing a colonoscopy, leaving Vice President Cheney in charge of the United States for the duration of the procedure.

The article, which was the top story on Google news briefly yesterday, had the unfortunate title “Bush butt probed, Cheney in charge” and began with “A shudder could be felt across Capitol Hill Friday after news came out that President Bush would be having his butt checked out…”

A quick search of Google News shows the story is still indexed. Perhaps Google will now be rethinking whether Axcess News should remain in the Google News index?

Axcess News, by the way, is a member of the esteemed Online News Association, which purports to be a serious group of online news sites. The president of the ONA is Kinsey Wilson, the Executive Editor of USAToday.com.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, July 21st, 2007 at 4:05 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Mustafa

    July 21st, 2007 at 4:38 am

    That’s hilareous!

  2. Ryan

    July 21st, 2007 at 4:40 am

    it’s funny how mike likes point his finger when sites goof.

  3. Ryan

    July 21st, 2007 at 4:41 am

    *to point

  4. Jason

    July 21st, 2007 at 5:19 am

    Well he’s fucked the rest of the world deep in their ass.. he can go and probe himself for all most of we in Europe care.

  5. Eric

    July 21st, 2007 at 5:38 am

    Very interesting!

  6. BoardTracker

    July 21st, 2007 at 5:40 am

    I noticed in the article on cnn.com about Bush going for the colonoscopy, they have a big advert for CNN International itself with the following headline..

    “Insight into places rarely seen on camera”

    It’s amazing how far ‘embedded’ reporters will go for a story these days but hopefully we will be spared the pictures this time.

  7. What's Hot Today.com

    July 21st, 2007 at 5:57 am

    That is absolutely hilarious. You want to see something really funny go to http://www.youtube.com and type in George Bush. Especially Will Ferrell impersonating georgie on Global Warming.

    Mike

  8. visible.mobi

    July 21st, 2007 at 5:58 am

    thats funny !

  9. Rex Dixon

    July 21st, 2007 at 6:17 am

    Since my site is down, and I’m relaxingly (is that a word?) working this morning - I got a great laugh out that one! Kudos Mike for sharing that!

    Rex

  10. Bluevoter

    July 21st, 2007 at 7:22 am

    Cheney as President, even for an hour, is a very scary thought. If that had happened in 1962, there might no longer be life on Earth. Give the man the Briefcase and you know he would like to use it. Just hope that he doesn’t issue any Executive Orders….

  11. Justin

    July 21st, 2007 at 7:24 am

    I’m not seeing the problem here. Are you one of these people who consider patriotism for your country is congruent with patriotism for the man whose butt occupies the seat?

  12. Marko Bijelic

    July 21st, 2007 at 7:29 am

    Maybe Google News Needs A Little Interface Tweaking?

    Prototype (without Ajax): http://rainfall-daffinson.com/casestudies/momenat/

  13. Webbster

    July 21st, 2007 at 7:38 am

    Justin - Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. (Samuel Johnson)

    To find Dubya’s it looks like they have to look up his arse !

  14. Anatoly

    July 21st, 2007 at 7:49 am

    Shouldnt Google News do a deeper probe into this? The indexing seems half assed to me. If they keep this up, they will be the butt of a lot of jokes.

  15. Wing Yu

    July 21st, 2007 at 8:55 am

    When you think about it, this may be the closest that the indexes at Google News ever approximated a human editor. It automatically did what the Drudge Report has always done. It assigned the most sensational headline to the top of the heap.

  16. Allen

    July 21st, 2007 at 9:28 am

    Here is a follow-up:
    http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITI.....topstories

  17. JG

    July 21st, 2007 at 10:32 am

    They only found polyps - Doctors are still searching for his head.

  18. Brian H

    July 21st, 2007 at 11:01 am

    Google rankings aren’t editorial. They reflect how often other sites link in, and traffic and so on. So your article just helped make sure it would stay near the top. Isn’t life an ironic bayatch?

  19. Nemrut

    July 21st, 2007 at 11:04 am

    ..the funny thing about all of this is how Bush’s staff will visualize him, the most powerful person on the planet, w/a tube up his butt once he returns to office.

  20. Ronald Lewis

    July 21st, 2007 at 11:49 am

    Hilarious — I submitted my podcast of interviews with top CEOs, etc. to Google News — only to be “declined” because there aren’t “multiple employees and/or editors” (I’m one-man new media producer).

    Perhaps they’ll one day reconsider their “limitations” on content providers. I even use professional titles for my content. :)

  21. jose

    July 21st, 2007 at 4:05 pm

    Apparently, the author of this article is against free press. This isn´t important, who would take that news seriously?.

  22. marc - godandweb20.com

    July 21st, 2007 at 5:05 pm

    aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

    thanks mike ! techcrunch is not usually the place to laugh ! thanks!

  23. AaronF

    July 21st, 2007 at 6:36 pm

    Having deployed and managed many tech centers in under served communities I can vouch for the fact that there is no silver bullet to prevent porn access to those who have Internet access. It’s just not possible. Regardless of what they do OLPC will be delivering porn access. Eh…so what? The good with the bad, right?

    From my personal experience I can tell you first hand that nothing beats having twenty+ of your tech center coordinators using curriculum with a link to http://www.whitehouse.com instead of http://www.whitehouse.gov. The former at the time was a goatse-esque porn site.

  24. AaronF

    July 21st, 2007 at 6:39 pm

    Wow, don’t know how I commented on the wrong article. Duh, this was intended for: http://www.techcrunch.com/2007.....ird-world/

  25. Whatever

    July 22nd, 2007 at 6:32 am

    Where does Google news get their stories? It seems rare that they ever link to mainstream media, but rather seem to favorite obscure news site.

    And that may be fine if they can vouch for their journalistic integrity, but anyone can toss up a news site and call themselves “serious journalists” and probably get Google to link to them.

  26. Lee S

    July 22nd, 2007 at 12:37 pm

    There are a lot of idiotic posts on this one. I’ll leave it to Bush Derangement Syndrome. So I bet it’s Bush’s fault that you fools over in England are allowing 20,000 Islamic terrorists to live amongst you. I can’t wait until you ultra-tolerant goofs start allowing Sharia Law.

  27. daniela barbosa

    July 22nd, 2007 at 2:32 pm

    Poynter Online a journalist site recently posted about the need for online news providers to get the ‘right’ headline for search engine optimization- and not only little outfits like AXcess news are struggling to find the right words:
    http://www.poynter.org/column......aid=117989

    The article author for AXcess was just trying to beat all the other stories to the top and managed to ‘kick butt’ doing it…

    and hate to break it to everyone but Cheney has been in charge the whole time today’s headlines that claims that Bush ‘reclaims’ power from Cheney are even funnier then a butt probe.

  28. Rb

    July 23rd, 2007 at 7:26 am

    Google news is fine.

  29. jamie martin

    July 23rd, 2007 at 5:11 pm

    this was the #1 story on digg for a while as well

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