Not the Post About Gay Marriage You Might Be Expecting
I had a rather surreal moment on Thursday. I visited Google News. Google News has the look of a newspaper website, but with the Spartan aesthetic common to all of Google's sites. The pages, however, are entirely computer-generated. The back-end software provides links to hundreds of stories from hundreds of news sites for each topic. For front-page articles, it will also pick a photo from one of the similar articles and display a thumbnail.
The headline read "Rosie O'Donnell Marries Her Partner". It was a link to a New York Times article. The nearby photo showed two people. Neither of them looked particularly like Rosie in the thumbnail. I clicked on the headline, only to discover that the Times article lacked a photo. When I went back and clicked on the photo, I discovered the reason the two people resembled Rosie so little: they were men from Chicago.
The headline read "Rosie O'Donnell Marries Her Partner". It was a link to a New York Times article. The nearby photo showed two people. Neither of them looked particularly like Rosie in the thumbnail. I clicked on the headline, only to discover that the Times article lacked a photo. When I went back and clicked on the photo, I discovered the reason the two people resembled Rosie so little: they were men from Chicago.