Thanks to an outdated news story that made an online comeback, got picked up by a wire service and caused United Airlines stock to temporarily plummet, the public now knows a little more about how the Web connects gazillions of news pages.
But first, the backstory: A 6-year-old newspaper story about United's bankruptcy on an achieved page on the Sun Sentinel’s Web site ended up posted to Bloomberg News as if it were current. The chain of events between the archived story and current post apparently are still under debate.
As a student of online news, what’s interesting in all this are phrases such as “news crawler,” “Googlebot,” “news scrapper” and "Web spider."
The terms are pretty self-explanatory. Virtual researchers troll cyber space for news then add them to news indexes, which is probably an oversimplified explanation of how articles from around the globe make it on to Google News.
As a student of online news, what’s interesting in all this are phrases such as “news crawler,” “Googlebot,” “news scrapper” and "Web spider."
The terms are pretty self-explanatory. Virtual researchers troll cyber space for news then add them to news indexes, which is probably an oversimplified explanation of how articles from around the globe make it on to Google News.
Who knew!
1 comment:
Glad you chose to post about this. I'd like to discuss it further in class, using as an opportunity to learn more about Google and its lovely bots.
You might consider using black font on white background for your design... it's a lot easier to read, though it doesn't look as cool.
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