From: nanowave (nanowave@shaw.ca)
Date: Wed Oct 16 2002 - 15:02:17 MDT
Curiously, a few minutes ago while checking Science Daily
http://www.sciencedaily.com (btw thanks Anders, since your pointer to this
site awhile back, it has indeed become my favorite) I noticed this
interesting headline: High-Tech Study of Maggots Yields Cancer Clues.
I read the article which is quite good, and then decided to click the
associated link back to the original news source: University Of Rochester
Medical Center (http://www.urmc.rochester.edu)
On the urmc site I could find no mention whatsoever of the study, but I
noticed they offered a mailing list for anyone interested in receiving
breaking news. Next I went back to Science Daily and read the fine print at
the bottom of the article, which indicated that story had indeed come from
an email press release.
Nothing odd so far, but here's what happened next. I decided to paste the
entire headline: "High-Tech Study of Maggots Yields Cancer Clues" into
google to get an idea of how many other news sites might be carrying the
story (in the hopes of finding more science news sites of Science Daily
caliber).
Google returned only four hits, but the third one was a link to the
following ALCOR document! www.alcor.org/Library/pdfs/alefione.pdf
But the document has nothing to do with maggots, and only tangential
references to cancer so it struck me as odd, given the vastness of the web,
that I scored a prominent >H hit in this roundabout manner. Does google know
something about me and the types of web sites I'm likely to be interested
in? I know that Amazon.com is getting very good at compiling such user data,
but google? Could google be accessing Amazon to mine data on my interests I
wonder? Or was the whole thing just a fluke? Probably.
Russell Evermore
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