I like to reverse-engineer news announcements and study how companies time the flow of information.
Specifically, it’s interesting to scrutinize how companies play the use of an embargo.
As I embarked on such an exercise involving the recent IBM mainframe news. I’m baffled by this riddle.
Look at the date stamp from the Google Search results on The New York Times article:
Clicking on the link brings up the actual New York Times story, but check out the date stamp:
Weird.
How is it possible that the “search” could come before the “story”?
If anyone can solve this one, I will be in your debt.
P.S. I plan to dive deeper into this announcement next week.
Comments
Limor
Hi, some of these incidents, which are not too rare, have to do with re-editing or with the CMS time definitions. For instance, around daylight saving times they might change the date automatically.
Lou
Thanks Limor. That makes sense, particularly because the NY Times story was published at 12:01 am on the 28th.
Bill Comcowich
The New York Times commonly publishes stories online the day before they appear in the print publication. Typically, the articles appear the afternoon before the morning print edition. It’s commonplace. The Google News search engine spiders major news sites on a near continuous basis and therefore finds the article within minutes of posting on the Times website.
Bill Comcowich
CEO, CyberAlert, Inc.
http://www.cyberalert.com
Nobody monitors media better than CyberAlert.
Lou Hoffman
Bill,
If that was the case, wouldn’t the online version carry the data it was published (8/27 instead of 8/28)?