“The selection and placement of stories on this page were determined automatically by a computer program.”

Please can someone at Google have a word with the person in charge of the algorithm – almost every day an inappropriate story gets coughed up into the Entertainment section.  Today’s example is pretty extreme -

Nestled in between

‘Strictly Come Dancing is fixed,’ says Joe Calzaghe (the former boxer who has been dubbed by some “the dancing wardrobe” for his wooden performances can’t understand why he didn’t win celebrity dancing show)

and

University Challenge contestants are given more clues, says producer (the only quiz show on TV for viewers with IQs in double figures drums up some much-needed publicity)

there is a very different story…

Yes,  this is a grotesque story about a vicious attack on a young girl by other teenagers. This is not what any rational person would consider “entertainment”.

How did it end up in Google News?  It must be the reference to social networking, or maybe because the attack was filmed by mobile video.  Still not an entertainment story!

Spotted anything else like this?  Please let us know by adding a comment below.

Most of these strange results are quite amusing, or just gently misleading. Such as the main headline referring to one football team proclaiming “We wuz robbed” next to a picture of a player from the opposition.

A bit more disturbing is the tendency for stories to end up in the wrong news category, most often with a Weird World / Quirky story appearing in Entertainment.

There’s an example live at the moment:

Woman is savaged in 18st reindeer attack.

By no stretch of the imagination is this an entertainment story, even if the poor woman was once a contestant on a reality TV show.

Was the Google algorithm confused by the tasteless “Sex rampage reindeer Mr Frosty gores woman” in the Metro – Mr Frosty sounding like a cartoon character, or possibly a reference to the Xmas song “Frosty the Snowman”?

It highlights that human editors do a very valuable job!

Have you come across any strange Google News results (in any country)?  Or have you any idea how this story got into the Entertainment category  – please let us know…

Last year I made a new friend who is a chief-sub on the Daily Record, one of Scotland’s biggest selling newspapers (maybe the biggest selling – sorry Katie). We have very different experiences of writing, especially headlines. Katie is working to a restricted space on the printed page, whereas I have no restrictions – which sounds great until you consider the different criteria you are trying to fit into.

It’s the limited space that has created “tabloidese” that peculiar language of abbreviations, wit and hyperbole. The nature of the beast means that these headlines are pretty devoid of keywords, so a high impact newspaper headline (such as the Sun’s infamous “Gotcha!” front page during the Falklands War) would have little value in SEO terms.

How does your headline affect Google News placement?
Google, of course, won’t reveal their algorithm for the News channel and it is still something of an enigma for search experts.

I looked for an example to try and understand more. Last night’s big entertainment story here was the Brit Awards. Why does Hello get the top link with their slang heavy headline?

Well, obviously, the headline is only a small part of the algorithm!

Having read around, there is conflicting advice. Here are some of the basics.

• Get your most important keyword / message near the start, so if your headline is cut off it still appears
• Shorter is better, even if it means sacrificing some keywords – your introductory paragraph is just as important
• Think about people (not robots) reading your story – will your headline be of interest to them?
• If you aren’t using a re-direct / url shortening system, your headline will probably dictate the url of your story (as works with this blog). If you then want to “tweet” your story on Twitter, you need to consider how the link eats into your 140 character limit

Have you got any advice to share?