To further confuse Google, the Picayune Leader could have replaced the Daily News’ image of Andrew Cuomo with a photo of Godfather actor Al Lettieri (image: Random Overload)
Among the bottomfeeders of the Internet ecosystem are “news scrapers”—websites that automatically harvest posts from actual news sites and repackage them in hopes of snagging some search engine hits and the accompanying online ad revenue.
Courts tend to frown on this practice as a dubious application of the “fair use” exception to copyright laws. Probably more importantly from the point of view of the scrapers themselves, Google takes a dim view of sites that merely recycle content available elsewhere, and tries to demote or delete them in search results.
One way to try to get around this is to automatically replace random words in the pilfered articles with synonyms. This works about as well as you might guess, as a news scraper post pointed out by FAIR contributing writer Neil deMause demonstrates.
The piece, on a site calling itself the Picayune Leader (“picayune” meaning “petty, worthless,” according to Oxford), begins:
Gov. Cuomo is set to veto a $22.2 million upgrade of a college stadium named immediately after a sitting Extended Island state senator that was slipped into the new state price range, the Everyday News has discovered.
Consulting the original piece, in a paper that prefers to call itself the Daily News, you find that the “state price range” is actually the state budget, and the state senator in question is from Long Island, not Extended Island.
Further down, an educational official is described as “a strong supporter of Frequent Core testing,” and a former legislative staffer is said to be going to work—actually, to “function”—for “Attorney Common Eric Schneiderman.” (In the Everyday News, he’s the attorney general.)
At the bottom of the piece, there’s a note from the Picayune Leader:
Our editors found this article on this site using Google and regenerated it for our readers.
I guess “regenerated” is one way to put it.
Picayunepost.com is currently doing this, and it looks like they have thousands of articles searchable on Google News. I have blogged (100% non-commercial blog) about this problem here: igibud.com/wordpress/?p=706. In addition to these ‘scraper’ sites, I also maintain on igibud.com a list of subpar articles featured on Google’s news page. If you know of any other articles or sites, please visit and add to my list.
Today’s choice of a Google Doodle is Nellie Bly, who represents the finest of the tradition of “muck-raking journalism”. It strikes me as ironic that Google would choose to celebrate her.
I see continued bad quality writing promoted on the top news page news.google.com. Here is some example text from an article about carbon emissions. The topic is not controversial among scientists, but usually draws a lot of skepticism from anti-science internet commenters, so it’s important that the journalistic standards be high. Sample text below from http://geekinfinite.com/news/2015/05/fiords-absorbs-18-million-tons-of-carbon-each-year/
“Out of 100 percent of world’s ocean surface fiords cover only 0.1 percent but account for 11 percent of the organic carbon in plants, soils and rocks that gets buried in marine sediments every year after being washed off the land by river.”
I continue to maintain a list of unacceptable articles on my blog http://igibud.com/wordpress/?p=704
The ongoing flaky quality problem is not getting any attention on Google user forums, which are dominated by non-US would-be contributors who feel they are entitled to get their websites featured by Google as “news”.
I’m not a paranoid-type, but I do see a pattern here. Articles about climate that Google features in their “science” section are frequently of this badly-written variety.