I like Google News, and it’s great to see CBC.ca stories heavily promoted in this news aggregator. But I’m puzzled by the way they mash up their top stories and their accompanying graphics.

See, the graphics aren’t really “accompanying” – they pull a headline from one story and a picture from another.
I suppose this lets them add another source to each headline, but it’s misleading. Sure, they identify the sources of each, but the layout still gives the impression that the pictures go with the stories – like they do everywhere else on the web.

Worse, the photos don’t always match. At 10:00 this morning, the top Google News story was “Israeli court sets free Palestinian deputy premier.”

The headline linked to a story from a source called AKI (Adnkronos International, an Italian news agency):

Jerusalem, 27 Sept. (AKI) – An Israeli military court ruled on Wednesday morning to release the Palestinian deputy prime minister Nassar al-Shaer, pan Arabic tv network Al Jazeera reports. He was arrested by Israeli soldiers on 19 August in Ramallah for his activities within the Hamas Islamic movement.

That story had no graphic, but there was one purportedly from E Canada Now (even though when you clicked there, it the story had no image.)

The problem? That’s not Nassar al-Shaer, deputy PM of Palestine. It’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, former president of Egypt. Who died in 1970.

By 10:15, the problem went away, because Google News rotated in new sources for both story and photo. It switched from AKI to one by Swissinfo and then other sources. By 10:30 it had fallen off the top spot, down to the More Top Stories section.

The E Canada Now story, “Israelr Releases Nasser Al-Shaer” (Israelr?) was still in the Google News rotation for that story, with no photo of either Nasser.

But on the site, they’ve fixed both the spelling of Israel, and the photo of Nasser.

So there’s the double-edged sword of getting your news story on Google: while it’s great promotion, it can also introduce problems, and archive the ones you make yourself.

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