Re:A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle
by zamadatix on Sunday April 10, 2022 @03:40PM
(#30980901)
I think the thing Google is falsely keying in on is actualy "Everyday Angels: national Day Journal" by Linda Finstad published in late 2020. She made a Pinterest post about the March 25th page being national peacock day which is what Google picked up which someone somehow noticed resulting in the coverage.
Of course nationally peacock day isn't actually a thing, even in Canada where Linda seems to be from, so I wonder where she got the idea! She has a website with a contact form so I sent her a short backstory on how I came to be contacting her and asked if she knew where she got March 25th as national peacock day. At the very least she'll probably be amused.
Re:A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle
by mdoms on Sunday April 10, 2022 @04:03PM
(#30981130)
This kind of thing is why I think Google's answers (not search results, the snippets with big bolded answers to questions) are dangerous. They're automatically generated from some pretty naive parsing of text from sources of dubious quality. I have found several pretty serious errors in these snippets when Googling for gardening advice.
Re:A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle
by BlueTemplar on Sunday April 10, 2022 @06:45PM
(#30982483)
This all reminds me of Stephen Colbert having a field day with "truthiness" already 17 (!) years ago. And "wikiality", when the population of elephants suddenly tripled thanks to his Wikipedia-editing efforts. (And much later, "Trumpiness".)
If you dig deeper though, there actually appears to be no such day, and the first reference to it other than a Draft Kings blog post was a Peacock Day event being held at the LA Arboretum years back.
Obviously such a trivial story has no real impact on the world, but it was eye-opening to see how a "fact" could essentially be brought to life out of nowhere.