Wednesday, June 16, 2004

V Crisis Disinformation Amplified by Google News

I posted two entries on the problem of disinformation promulgated by V Crisis today: "V Crisis Attacks Greg Wilpert, Etc." and "Boyd Made V Crisis Void." Since then, I've checked the web traffic analysis of V Crisis at www.vcrisis.com/w3logs/, which shows that, as of June 16, 2004, 9:51 PM, the top referrer to V Crisis (receiving 1659 visits today, 29661 hits this month) is Google News:
cnx referer %
34254 http://news.google.com 26.66%
9347 http://www.venezuelatoday.net 7.27%
8051 http://venezuelatoday.net 6.27%
6125 http://www.google.com 4.77%
4442 http://www.venenews.net 3.46%
3902 http://vcrisis.com 3.04%
3078 http://www.proveo.org 2.4%
3002 http://www.newsmax.com 2.34%
2701 http://search.yahoo.com 2.1%
2285 http://venenews.net 1.78%
Google News claims: "We're always interested in hearing from our users, especially the ones who have not found what they were expecting. During this beta period, we're particularly interested in your feedback on what's working and what's not" ("Google News (BETA)"). Obviously, Google News is not working as it should if it treats V Crisis as a "news source," especially since Aleksander Boyd himself clings to the following disclaimer regarding V Crisis's content:
The author reserves the right not to be responsible for the topicality, correctness, completeness or quality of the information provided. Liability claims regarding damage caused by the use of any information provided, including any kind of information which is incomplete or incorrect, will therefore be rejected. All offers are not-binding and without obligation. Parts of the pages or the complete publication including all offers and information might be extended, changed or partly or completely deleted by the author without separate announcement. (Aleksander Boyd, "Disclaimer")
You might give Google News your feedback at news-feedback@google.com.

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