Google news description blunder

Posted by: Marketing Guy Date posted: December 14th, 2006 Published in: Google, Rants n Drama

Just got a hat tip from Dave at Square Angle about this one.  The description has been changed now, but this appeared on the homepage of UK Google News:

Google News Blunder

The live results are now fixed – the description was pulled from a sponsored listing on the news article page.

Now the question is – why did Google choose this highly inappropriate description in the first place?  It was probably pulled randomly from the page, but surely it is within the technical ability of the big G to pull at least semi-relevant descriptions.

It could be that the entire sponsored link text can be found within an H4 tag – perhaps giving the text more relevance than it otherwise would?

Checking the code of the page, it roughly breaks down as this:

  • H1 = “News Story”
  • H2 = “The article title”
  • H3 = “Related stories links”
  • H4 = “Sponsored links” (interestingly, the descriptions are H4, but the titles (bold) aren’t)
  • THEN the content

So…the page uses several H# tags to markup a lot of content before the actual body text (which is an unusual way to approach markup) – perhaps this is why Google picked up the sponsored result text as a description?  They simply grabbed some text based on markup?

However, given that most news items can deal with serious subjects that can provoke a lot of emotion in people, surely leaving descriptions to random chance isn’t the best way to go?

MG

ADDED: Just had a shudering thought that this might spark a new level of Google news spamming – getting your URL into the description of popular stories! >.<