practicallyspeaking

In the “information age” as it has been dubbed by more than a few. Things are getting stickier all of the time. Google is now the cause of major airlines stock dropping over $11? Some background for those of you who do not know about this growing scandal. Google uses an algorithm called “googlebot” this complex and quite frankly very ingenious technology has made it possible for billions of people to find information easily. In fact for those of us lucky few who use gmail google’s email system we see this technology all of the time on the sides of the pages where google puts links to sites, articles and other informational stuff, how do they know which ones to put up? The googlebot scans our emails for key words and content and then does inquiries for us. If all of this sounds like something out of a bad sci-fi flick then you are probably reading this correctly. So how does this seemingly harmless search engine technology collapse one of the largest airlines in our country? By doing the exact same thing. In the early morning hours when there are only porn junkies and late night chatters up, an unsuspecting reader when onto a small papers website and read an article about United and their 2002 bankruptcy. The googlebot doing its best to keep all of the google word informed scans news articles read in the last 24 hours. This out of date article that has no discerning date tags on it comes up as poplar, mainly because no one left on the internet at that time of day cares anything about the news. The article is then put onto a google news list as a breaking news story. From there the whole thing falls apart people start reading it thinking that it is happening now and not six years ago. Investors get wind of it and start to sell of their shares and we get a hailstorm of market action. There are a couple of things about this story that really drive me absolutely nuts. First of all, google news is now a credible web resource for breaking information? When did people stop using reliable sources, and then cross-checking them with other sources to find out the facts? Secondly, why are there not a specific set of guidelines, (ie putting the date on your articles) for news sources to follow before they are put up? This could be an FCC issue? Maybe, but probably not because they are looking at so much information being put out that could miss it. The federal government is going to have to put some regulations on legitimate news sources, some kind of tag so that people know it is not only true but current? Some freedom of press people, and internet enthusiasts may disagree with me but, this is the only way we are ever going to control this beast that we have created. Lastly, I am scared for the future of our country if simple little things like this can make such a huge impact. Freedom of the press is a great thing and it keeps the government from controlling us. But has the media simply taken the governments place. The internet and its ability to hack into almost anything in today’s world has created an information leak. Soon it may be hard to tell what is true and what is not, of wait for United it already is.

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