Google News Fooled by 15-Year Old Boy

A 15-year old boy, Tom Vendetta, submitted a fake Google press release claiming that Google was hiring him as Google’s youngest employee. The fake press release was submitted to i-Newswire and picked up by Google News.

image by Google Blogoscoped

The press release read as follow:

“(I-Newswire) – 15 year old student, Tom Vendetta has been hired by search engine giant Google Inc. The student will receive a lowered salary, which will be placed into a bank account for future education, said Google CEO Larry Page. When asked what role Vendetta will play at the Tech Giant’s offices, Page said he wouldnt have a role at the Main Offices. Instead he would work from his home in the New Jersey suburbs. Vendetta will be incharge of working with recent security flaw’s in Google’s beta e-mail service, “Gmail”. Google said they first found out about him when they discovered the student’s blog, at http://tomvendetta.be. The media giant said they looked forward to working with Vendetta’s expertise in JavaScript and AJAX.”

Results

The news caused a big response on the Internet. The news has been removed in both Google News and i-Newswire. Google News also removed i-Newswire from its index, meaning Google News will not take news from i-Newswire anymore. On the other hand, Google accepted Tom Vendetta’s apology.

My two cents

It was only a just-for-fun joke that may have easily been rejected by press release websites, but it turned out to be a big news and revealed the weakness of Google News automated news picking system.

Afterall, i-Newswire is the poorest victim in this case. Hopefully Google News lift the ban soon.

[via The SEO Blog]