One of my Engineering mate sent a mail to Yahoo groups with a headline " George Bush Arrested in Canada". I was surprised with what i read on the link he had sent across. Here is the link for that news http://www.world-cnn.com/2004/WORLD/americas/11/30/bush.arrest/.
After reading the entire thing i was still not convinced about what had happened. But since the reporting news agency was The Associated Press and the medium which was brodcasting it was CNN, i believed it. Me being a true Software professional i forwarded this one to all my colleagues at office and other friends in IT industry. Word among IT industry spread likes forest fires.
I guess this mail has reached every IT company in Bangalore by today evening. And then few of my friends responded back to my mail, saying it was "bullshit","Checkout the dates of the article’s published.................","ahh buddy, plz verify the news b4 u send..i really appreciate ur or friends work in making a spurious page.", i guess many of them thought i was just spreading the rumour.
So i hit Google's News Service for that and i found only 10 links for the search. So i hit a couple of links and then here the truth was out there. The headline was taken from the Axis of Logic Web site. If u want to know what exactly happpened here are the two articles i read Microsoft's Slate and UK's The Inquirer.
As they have stated it was actually flaws that exists in Google's Algorithms in collecting News Headlines from world wide web, i say that because the article was taken from Axis of Logic under the section which clearly states "Political Satire". Now i feel the algorithms used For Google's News service has a flaw in it.
Come what may, i feel there is no other search engine better than google. It's easy, simple and very effective.
3 comments:
Well the link for the original article is no longer valid, but yeah... it's unlikely that the President of the US would be arrested. Hee. My rule of thumb is that I never believe anything unless I can verify it at at least 4 major WORLDWIDE news sources, (and not thru links that have been sent to me)... and one of them has be the BBC.
Think something might be an "urban legend"? Go to www.snopes.com and run a search. They research all kinds of forwarded email and the like. Handy resource!
Here's an alternative to googling,
http://clusty.com/
it lets you browse search results based on categories
Google is really google
Step 1:
Go to http://www.google.co.in/language_tools?hl=en
Step 2:
Enter the following line into the translate textbox:
Malika Sherawat's mom is nice and cool
Step 3:
Translate from English to Spanish.
Step 4:
Copy the translated text, and translate it back from Spanish to English.
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