December 8, 2005
Google gremlins cause glitch: Everything old is news again
Last Thursday, the Office of News and Information was bamboozled by Google, specifically by Google News. This was the day that “everything old became new again.”
The first time I noticed a problem was actually Wednesday. I subscribe to Google News and have it preset to send me stories that mention the UW. Google News scavenges information from public Web news sites — the New York Times, Washington Post and, lately, uwnews.org — and assembles it on its own site, news.google.com
That afternoon, I received the longest e-mail I ever received from Google. I looked at the first item. The headline read, “Leroy Hood to leave UW.” I opened the item and saw that it was linked to a UW news release that we wrote in 1999. I noticed that all the other items in my mail were, uh, less than current.
I asked our Web programmer how this could happen. “I have no idea,” he said, “but if you find out let me know.”
Lots of people subscribe to Google News. The calls and e-mails began coming in to our office early the next morning.
“How come you’re issuing a news release about a faculty member who has been dead for three years?”
“That conference in Yakima that you’re publicizing occurred in 2003!”
“Don’t you know that the information you sent concerning orcas in Puget Sound is outdated? Don’t you know the population has rebounded? Why are you trying to damage our businesses?”
This was getting to be a problem. It reminded me of a saying from Mark Twain, “A lie can go halfway around the world while the truth is still putting its boots on.” Except in this age of instant communication, old news had gone around the world several times before we realized what was up.
We decided to try and call Google. As an exercise, I suggest you go to the Google Web site and try to figure out how to get hold of a human being. It’s relatively easy, once you know how, but it’s clear the company’s strong preference is to receive e-mails sent to an anonymous address. I realized quickly that I might wait days for a reply to an e-mail message, but we had to stop this proliferation of old news as quickly as we could.
I scoured the Google site and found the press center. Luckily, some of their news releases had names and contact information, including phone numbers. I started calling. I didn’t get hold of anyone right away, but I was careful to leave a message saying that, if we didn’t hear from them very soon, we were going to issue our own news release about how Google had bungled the job of collecting news by being unable to distinguish between items posted today and those from 1997.
About 10 minutes after leaving a message, a woman named Sonja called me. She urged me not to issue a news release, and that one of their customer support people at Google News would call shortly.
Over the next few hours I received three more calls from the Google people, each time with information that was leading closer to the source of the problem. Finally near the end of the day we received an e-mail. An engineer had isolated the problem and had found ways to prevent it from happening again.
Two days later, we’re still receiving calls from citizens outraged or confused by our old news. Most of them are mollified when we explain what happened.
But the best call was one that came to my colleague Leila Gray, who works in our sister office in the Health Sciences Center. It was from a reporter at Weight Watchers who wanted to follow up on the information in our release. The release, she realized, was issued in 2004. But the information in it was still timely — indeed, it was still available in the current section of the Food and Drug Administration Web site — and the researcher was still at the UW.
Leila’s comment on the experience: “Maybe we should recycle some of our news releases periodically. No news like the old news!”
