The news has just broken here in the UK, that Mark Lester, former child actor, and well known for his appearance as Oliver in the famous musical.
At the moment of typing this, Google, Yahoo and Bing all lead with the Wikipedia article, followed by IMDB.
It’ll be interesting to see if they push the news items that this claim will produce high up the search listings.
Oliver at Amazon UK or Oliver at Amazon US
UPDATE: OK, it’s an hour or so later, and Google has started to bring in news results. Just the one, so far, from Miami Herald. The story is being run by News of The World here in the UK, so you would expect the references to that newspaper to push their results onto the page, but not yet. Nothing on Yahoo and Bing first pages as of yet…
No replaced with a more ‘authoritative’ AP news item
Update about 20 minutes later: Well Google takes the prize. The news items are now top of thelisting for searches such as mark lester, mark lester paternity, mark lester paternity claim and michael jackson paternity claim. Yahoo and Bing are still the same they were before the news broke. Well done Google and your ability to bring breaking news into the search engine.
Not having any real idea how Yahoo and Bing do things behind the scenes, solutions seem fairly simple. They have, on one side, a variety of incoming news feeds, and on the other side, the public facing search results. It doesn’t take a great deal of computing to figure out a trending story from the incoming feeds, trusted blogs, forums etc. and make a decision whether to pass it into the search listing. Even a semi automated version that texted/emailed 20+ staff with a decision and links to the news items that have caused the decision and need a threshold %age of YES and below a certain %age of NO before pushing it though to the search listings would be possible as a solution. It’s not like Yahoo and Microsoft don’t have staff around the world willing and able to respond to a phone call at all hours.
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