Google Drops News Partner
Google heavily relies on automated crawlers and ranking systems to populate its news page. This often results in biased stories and press releases from non-credible news sources getting top billing in their news search results. As mentioned previously, Yahoo has the best news search engine for my needs as a blogger and researcher. Here is another reason why Google is going to lose market share to its competitors-
Google’s news service has cut ties with a press release aggregator after the partnership led Google News to link to a fake item written by a teenager who said he’d been hired by the search giant.
On March 10, Thomas Vendetta, a sophomore at Pitman High School in New Jersey, posted a fake press release to I-Newswire.com, a Web site that lets people submit press releases for distribution to online sites. The release said Vendetta had been hired by Google to work on fixing a security flaw in Gmail.
“The student will receive a lowered salary, which will be placed into a bank account for future education, said Google CEO Larry Page,” the release read.
Google News picked up the item from I-Newswire that same day, and two days later news aggregator site Digg.com also linked to the item, Vendetta told CNET News.com. All three news sites moved quickly to remove the item from their pages.
And last Tuesday, I-Newswire quickly yanked from its site a release that falsely reported that actor Will Ferrell was killed in a paragliding accident. It was unknown who was responsible for that item, which also appeared on Google News.
“I hate the idea that news releases can make it into Google News, and that any idiot (myself included), can submit one, no matter how ridiculous, ruining the integrity of one of the most popular Web sites,” Nathan Weinberg wrote in a posting on his Inside Google blog.
Two things- First, it is a hilarious notion that Will Ferrell would be slain in a tragic paragliding accident!
Second, there is a real vulnerability to Google’s ability to generate revenue highlighted here. I wrote an earlier blog about how Google is vulnerable to Click Fraud. News Fraud is also very dangerous to Google and its investors because of Google’s use of non-credible news sources. Here’s how:
A Joe-Job is a cyber-security term that typically applies to spam, but it could easily be adapted to attack a company like Google. A Joe-Job is a scam in which an attacker forges a spam email falsely originating from a business that claims that it will do something horrible- such as giving away all of its customer private data to a “clearinghouse” of some sort. The intent of the spam is to generate a flood of inquiries, angry emails, news reports and unwanted and false attention on the victim company, flooding its phone and internet services with emails and phone calls, and burning the hours of its personnel to combat this attack against its infrastructure and its reputation.
If Google accepts falsified news and press releases without verifying the veracity of its stories, Google could be held liable if a malicious organization used Google’s news distribution services to Joe-Job a corporation. Instead of using Spam email, the attacker simply crafts a fake news release- for instance, claiming that a major Big Box corporation suffered an intrusion and all of the personal information of its customers were stolen- or there is a big giveaway for the first 1000 visitors to the store, etc. If the victim company realizes that Google negligently published such a news release, Google could be sued- and such a lawsuit would negatively impact Google’s business and stock price.
