Duplicate News Articles Among Others????

I admit, I found the news this morning weird. I have also wondered about the "other teams" news. I find it interesting to read some of the other teams news.

daWest,

Thanks for your feedback. Let me explain how our news feed works.

Our site checks the news feeds of the popular San Francisco Giants news sources regularly and pulled the content from their sites. This process can occasionally result in some false positives.

For example, we search Fox Sports baseball news for the word Giants. However, today, there was an article titled "San Jose Giants beat Bakersfield Blaze 6-3" which, of course, was a false positive.

However, some things that look like false positives are now. The articles "A's Gio Gonzalez deservedly milks moment" and "Bud Selig defends slow pace of A's ballpark panel" actually contain a little bit of Giants information within the articles. The first contains information about Brian Wilson wanting to see Carlos Beltran in a Giants uniform while the second contains information about the Giants territorial rights.

Of the articles that you mentioned, the "Bobby Cramer released by A's" article was a false positive, but does for some reason appear within the San Francisco Chronicle's San Francisco Giants feed ... twice on two different URLs.

The "Blue Jays' Jose Bautista is a blast from the past" article does contain news about Giants pitcher Ryan Vogelsong.

"After 18 lean years, the Pirates are back in it" was automatically grabbed because it does briefly mention the Giants revamp after Bonds' departure.

"Alex Rodriguez to have knee surgery" is a false positive and was within the San Francisco Chronicle's Giants feed. Apparently something they feel Giants fans want to know for some reason? I don't know.

"TIMING ALMOST WRIGHT TO PLAY BALL AGAIN" does mention the Giants ... thus it was targeted to be pulled.

Now, that is not to say that we are not always trying to do better. I can do something now about the duplicates posted from The San Francisco Chronicle that I am seeing. However, for the others, we are dependent on how the news sources classify their news. We can always hide news from the news wire though and are happy to do so if it legitimately does not contain any mention of the Giants.

We appreciate such feedback and hope to only improve our news searches down the road.

back in the early days of the 49ersWebzone and over at NinerCapHell, I helped in searching the news feeds along with another poster and we physically posted those stories on the websites. dawest, you would be welcome to send a news item to the admins here to post but by using the rss feeds this is done automatically, eliminating but not invalidating the need for someone to search and add content.

The biggest culprit is the San Francisco Chronicle. Just look at their Giants page:

http://www.sfgate.com/sports/giants/

Look at the news under the "S.F. Giants news from the Chronicle" header. There are some of the non-Giants related articles you mentioned. It is possible that some of that is due to interest in the All-Star game. But this tends to happen a lot.

On 49erswebzone.com, I manually scan the San Francisco Chronicle news since they tend to do this a lot. I would be willing to do so on here as well, but if I can find an automated way to filter out what we do not need, that would be ideal for both sites. And searching for keywords like "San Francisco" or "Giants" is not always 100% accurate either.

The Chronicle is famous for their 'updates.' Sometimes they simple correct the spelling of one word, or add a definitive article (that's a grammar word) into the article. The rss feed then sees it as a new article written on the new day. Every so often, an update is truly an update. Not just an edit.

Thanks for the response guys. I have to admit, I didn't consider the fact that articles appearing in the news feed show up there through an automated system. That certainly sheds light on the subject.

Thanks Again

I found a 49ers article in the list and thought that it was there because the Giants were part of the topic. Color me shagrinned when it was just strictly 49ers. Yeah they're my favorite NFL team, but...

~Ceadder