Not a terrific example of the failure to report important news,
though. Michael Jackson was a pop star. He sold a lot of records
once. He's not important to civilization as we know it. His death
has little practical significance except to sell a lot more albums--
which probably wouldn't have sold if he were still alive. This is
definitely news we could have waited for.
In re the failure of the search engines to get the story on the first
search page immediately: There are a lot of ways in which Google (or
Bing) fails. For example, search engines are not a reasonable
substitute for the judgement of a genuine expert or for scholarly
bibliographies. Those cute little algorithms may tell you what's
popular, but they can't give you the items that are likely to be
accurate or that are likely to reflect scholarly consensus in a
field. (At least not in my academic specialties. BTW, the standard
news media don't do very well with them either.)
But, in spite of its limitations, I don't want to give these search
engines a hard time for not ranking stories about Michael Jackson's
death at the top of the page, right after it happened. As an event,
it's just NOT THAT IMPORTANT.
--Constance Warner
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