Every week, MrConsumer skims thousands of news story headlines to find the three dozen or so he presents in Consumer World. Over the past month, however, he has noticed that some news stories that are presented as only a few hours old in Bing News are anything but.
For example, last week he saw this story headline about Kroger deciding to no longer accept Visa credit cards. Certainly a story like that would be of great interest to many Consumer World readers.
*MOUSE PRINT:
Clicking that headline link brings a big surprise.
The Kroger story that Bing said was just an hour old was actually posted online in 2018 — eight years earlier!
Here are some other recent examples of news stories presented as hot off the press but which are actually anything but.
We asked the PR agency for Microsoft last week to explain why this is happening, for how long, and what is the company going to do to correct it. Through the agency, a Microsoft spokesperson responded:
“A small number of older stories were inadvertently included in Bing News and appeared as newly published. Our teams have identified the issue and are working to implement a fix.”
Hats off to Microsoft for taking quick action to put the “new” back in Bing News, but as of today (April 20), old news is still presented as new.
I wonder how something like this happens. I guess you’d have to know how Bing generates those listings on the back end to really understand how it could accidentally pull an article from 2013 and mark it as new.
I don’t think any of the stories are untrue, but I doubt Kroger would be happy with Bing bringing up an 8-year-old issue and pretending like it’s happening today.
I see this same thing with Google. I’m looking for something that happened within 24 hours, so I select that, but I still mainly get results years old. I really have to dig to find the recent news item. Is this the result of AI getting involved and not really understanding the request?
I have little faith in their “false” headlines — even weather related articles are often old news. Headlines are often created to grab attention but when reading the article I find it untrue. I have written a couple of complaints to them but am just a small voice. Now I just don’t read their news.
Yet another AI fail, an AI scanner just found the article so it was “new” to it.