November 14, 2014

Dupes by bots

Have you noticed this? There are lots of duplicate stories at news sites. On the very same page you'll find a story twice, sometimes even three times. Same image, same text.

Obviously these stories are collected by a bot -- an algorithm or rule -- that sends stories to various pages based on internal tags. The problem is that the process is lushly duplicative and no one is in charge of the bots. I doubt any human being reviews these web pages. It's all automated. Gotta keep the costs down, y'know.

The screenshot above is from a HuffPo page. Even side by side, no one noticed.

The sites need to fix this. It makes them look like fools.

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