Google News foiled by teen
A 15 year old managed to fool Google’s news system into publishing a press release saying that the outfit had just hired him. Tom Vandetta described himself as a "Google fanboy" and penned a press release saying that Google had hired him as its youngest employee.He issued it through the free service I-Newswire and despite the fact it contained a number of spelling mistakes it was picked up.
He logged into the news search tool Digg after receiving an automated email from MAKEBot (Digg's Spider), to find his practical joke had become a credible international tech story.
Google itself was displaying reference to the press release in Google News and the news results placed above search results relating to Google employment or hiring.
Vandetta has got his 15 minutes of fame and his Gmail account received almost 400 emails in the first few hours. His parents are changing their phone number because they are fed up with journalists ringing.
However it has shown up how easy it is to get fake news on the Google system which does not verify press releases before publishing them as factual news.
By: Nick Farrell of The Inquirer ^ TOP
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