 Wednesday, January 18, 2006
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Googleanche!
Bernard Hibbitts at 11:40 AM
Googleanche, n. A flood of visitors to a website from Google...
Timing is everything. On Tuesday, high online interest in the Alito nomination combined with a JURIST op-ed by Ohio State law professor Peter Shane provocatively entitled Hollow Ritual: The Alito Confirmation Hearings to put that piece on the front page of Google News [screenshot] for much of the day. At several points, readers were hitting it more than once a second, and by the end of the day it had racked up more than 12,000 downloads. It was a classic Googleanche. Our server is still trying to recover.
Now of course we're happy with the traffic, but it was, in essence, an accident. Other excellent pieces and well-researched news items from JURIST do not do nearly as well. Some do not get into Google News at all for technical reasons having to do with how Google crawls websites, even though JURIST is an approved Google News source.
In an online world where more and more people find out what's going on through Google, we need to do better than this, at least if people are to be properly informed. Web crawlers and algorithms are helpful if you're running a news site with few staffers, but ultimately human editors need to intervene to set substantive priorities, fill in the gaps and filter out the dross. Good or bad, pro or con, technical "accidents" should not determine who sees particular information or opinions. If they do, what you've got is a prescription not for understanding, but for chaos.
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