Kevin Mook's Blog

Google News Strikes Again

“The Wall Street Journal reports that Google News crawled an obscure reprint of an article from 2002 when United Airlines was on the brink of bankruptcy. United Airlines has since recovered but due to a missing dateline, Google News ran the story as today’s news. The story was then picked up by other news aggregators and eventually headlined as a news flash on Bloomberg. This triggered automated trading programs to dump UAL, cratering the stock from $12 to $3 and evaporating 1.14 billion dollars (nearly United’s total market cap today) in shareholder wealth. The stock recovered within the day to $10 and is now trading at $9.62, a market cap of $300M less than before Google ran the story.”

(found through slashdot.org: http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/10/203233 )

WTF Google... Epic fail

So I was setting up a RSS reader on my iGoogle homepage, and as soon as I added the reader, I noticed my homepage changed drastically. All my gadgets had changed, there’s a new bar on the left of my homepage that lists all my gadgets (which I can see on the page anyway), and worst of all, all my normal feeds now list snippets of their content. Previously, I could click a + box and read the entirety of the information (or in the case of xkcd, view the comic). Now I can only read the first few words with no ability to read the entire summary.

Here’s a pic of what it looks like: http://etev.us/pics/newIGoogle.png

Upon clicking the “Learn more” link, I was directed to this site: http://www.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=97658 which told me to “post in our discussion group.” Upon going to the discussion group, at the very top I see this post:

Hi everyone,

As you’ve probably noticed from several of the messages posted in this group, we’re rolling out some experimental new iGoogle features to a small percentage of our users. Since we’re running a controlled experiment, we’re not offering a method of opting in or out of the new features.

If you’ve got the new features and you’d like to share your feedback, I encourage you to click “Learn more” at the top of your iGoogle page and take the survey linked from the “Learn more” page.

-Paul
iGoogle Guide

The thread is FULL of people complaining about the new “feature” and asking to be removed from the group.

Word to the wise, never take a random portion of your user base, subject them to an “experimental new feature,” and tell them they have no way to opt out. Especially if just about everyone subjected to this “experiment” has disliked it.

Oh, and this is the best part: The complaints that I have, have been made already by people in the above mentioned thread over a month ago, and have clearly fallen on deaf ears. It doesn’t look like they’ll be fixing these issues anytime soon. I posted my own comment asking to be removed, but if my homepage isn’t fixed my tomorrow it looks like I’ll be moving over to Yahoo.

Update: Apparently if you go to My Account, then the settings link next to iGoogle, under Troubleshooting you are able to “Restore your iGoogle page to the last backup.” This worked for me, and I got out of the awful experiment. If anyone else gets pulled in and wants to get out, be sure to do this before the next automatic backup since apparently once it backs up the broken version, there’s no going back.