Google and Its Plague of Evil Unicorns
November 17, 2017
Real journalists are Google’s picadors. I read “Inside Google’s Struggle to Filter Lies from Breaking New.” I almost feel the bull’s pain. “Who are these pointy word wielders anyway?”
The answer is Bloomberg, the “real” news outfit.
I learned from the write up:
“Evil unicorns” — a term some Google engineers once coined, according to a former executive — are unverified posts on obscure topics, full of lies.
Okay. The write up added:
For years, Google fought and won a similar battle with spammers, content farms and so-called search engine optimization experts over which web pages should be shown at the top of search results. But these latest web manipulators are causing greater havoc by targeting a slightly different part of Google — its real-time news and video results. They’re exploiting a weakness that cuts to the core of Google’s main proposition: Delivering trusted information online.
I like the assumption that Google results were different somehow in the past. Ah, the fog of memory and time.
I noted this statement:
…vetting news sources is an unwelcome task. Critics have ripped into Google and Facebook for categorizing certain publications, and not others, as news. It’s a political mire Google’s search unit is very reluctant to wade into.
Well, who can vet news? Maybe “real” journalists? Of course.
Stephen E Arnold, November 17, 2017
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