I tend to use Google News as my primary source of nationwide news these days. It aggregates thousands of news stories automatically, and is good at making sure I see a ‘blend’ of things, versus getting my news from one source.
It has one strange bug, though: its algorithm for truncating long news titles makes no sense. Sometimes it truncates an article title way too early. Consider the above, for example. I chuckled that the WSJ would publish an article whose title underhandedly mocks Youtube for not having anything worthwhile.
Except that this isn’t the case. The article is entitled “YouTube to Offer Some Content From China’s Olympic Games,” but it got split up across two lines, so Google News only took the first one.
That said, I’d rather watch half the stuff on Youtube than the Olympics. But I’m a grumpy curmudgeon about the Olympics.
It’s really hard to do that sort of thing automatically. Software doesn’t really understand what it is “reading.”
Yeah, it looks like it was the linebreak that screwed it up in this case. In long titles it seems to truncate. My real “beef” was that it often doesn’t indicate that it’s truncated, resulting in bizarre-sounding article titles.
Sometimes where the computer “decides” to truncate is what makes it so entertaining, such as this case. 😉