Google News Glitch: SpaceX Private Space Flight is “Delicious”

Sep 29, 2008 at 1:12pm ET by Matt McGee

A Search Engine Land reader points us toward the Science/Tech category of Google News, where, for the better part of the morning, a CNET news article about private rocketry was displaying with the headline, “Delicious.” Here’s a screenshot:

Google News Glitch

Ironically, the story — about the first time a privately-financed rocket has reached orbit — doesn’t appear to have any bookmarks on delicious.com, nor is it clear why Google chose that word for the story’s title. Many other stories on CNET are also appearing this way.

While the story has moved off as shown above, you can still currently see it appearing with the odd headline such as through a search like this.

Google News was in the news earlier this month for date-related glitches: Barry Schwartz wrote about Google News Indexing Old Stories As New, a problem that led to an 11% drop in United Airlines’ stock price. In that case, an article from 2002 about United declaring bankruptcy made it into Google News when Google’s news crawlers found it on the Florida Sun-Sentinel website.

The “Delicious” headline glitch above isn’t as serious a situation, but surely the SpaceX company — creators of the “Falcon 1″ rocket that’s now in orbit — would prefer the exposure of having their company and product name showing correctly in the CNET headline that should be on Google News.

Bottom line: There are still issues to be worked out with the automated crawling and indexing of news articles.


Matt McGee is the Search Engine Land Assignment Editor, and offers search marketing consulting and training to businesses of all sizes. He blogs at Small Business Search Marketing and HyperlocalBlogger.com.

See more articles by Matt McGee >

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