Jack Yan: the Persuader Blog: The Daleks are running the asylum

Antony Mayﬁeld blogged yesterday about how some headline writers may have to bend to the search engines’ wishes. Google News is now such an important destination for many people for their daily dose of current events that publishers fear that it won’t pick up the more creative headline.
Quoting The New York Times:

The search-engine “bots” that crawl the Web are increasingly inﬂuential, delivering 30 percent or more of the trafﬁc on some newspaper, magazine or television news Web sites. And trafﬁc means readers and advertisers, at a time when the mainstream media is desperately trying to make a living on the Web. …
In newspapers and magazines, for example, section titles and headlines are distilled nuggets of human brainwork, tapping context and culture. “Part of the craft of journalism for more than a century has been to think up clever titles and headlines, and Google comes along and says, ‘The heck with that,’” observed Ed Canale, vice president for strategy and new media at The Sacramento Bee.

This is daft. I thought technology was here to serve us, not the other way around.
Google News won’t pick up Lucire headlines, thinking their ﬁrst paragraph is it. Fine by me: the ﬁrst paragraph is pretty descriptive. And Lucire, the web edition, has been getting search-engine trafﬁc for quite some time—any online publisher knows that.
My solution to these woes? Wait it out. Never sacriﬁce your creativity because that makes you human. And certainly do not sacriﬁce it for a machine.
If, that is, Google is interested in bettering its technology to match what people are doing.
Let’s hope that impetus for improvement is there.
Technology works for humans. End of story.

Del.icio.us tags: media | journalism | technology | Google | news | emotion | humanity | search engine

Posted by Jack Yan, 05:29 permalink

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Comments:

as new technology comes along it will invariably influence and change the way that we conduct ourselves - look at how the industrial revolution changed the face of work. We will loose certain trades and new ones will be created.

We may also change the way we do things because of technology. Look at the lost art of typesetting.

Though there are always pockets of resistance – people who cling to these old and lost professions.

# posted by

markoos: 4/10/2006 08:02:00 AM

True, but with typesetting, we did become more efﬁcient—we didn’t become less creative when PostScript came along, but more creative. It unlocked creative potential within people. Yes, some bits were lost, but they are being reclaimed rapidly, so much so that typesetting is close to where it was prior to phototypesetting. Here, we are asking people to limit their creativity when, probably in six months, the Google News bot will be improved—one would hope—to make this a non-issue.

# posted by

Jack Yan: 4/10/2006 09:17:00 AM

You mention that the search engines don't pick up the headlines on Lucire, but that's because you're using image files for the headlines. An image of text isn't text, even if you set its alt attribute to be the text in the image.

All you really need to do is create a class of h1 or h2 to look the way you want, and the spiders will happily index your headlines.

# posted by

qwerty: 4/11/2006 04:05:00 AM

Qwerty, it was one of those ‘I realized it right after I typed it’ things. You are absolutely right. I have to add that it has picked up some totally weird things though—like the byline as the headline, and not the intro. I realized it was because the byline was entered as all caps and Google News picked that up as a headline—clever, in my opinion. It’s why I think the Google News bot might be cleverer, or could get cleverer.

# posted by

Jack Yan: 4/11/2006 07:43:00 AM