Switched has a new home! Huffpost Tech.

Click here to visit the new home of Switched!

Hot on HuffPost Tech:

See More Stories
AOL Tech

Yahoo! Article About Eliot Spitzer Accidentally Links to Adult Web Site

by Tim Stevens on August 9, 2008 at 05:05 PM

Yahoo's Keyword Advertising MisfiresA link promising pictures of "underage girls" is just the sort of thing you'd expect to find on one of the many questionable sites that make up the seedier side of the Web. Stick with the mainstream news sites and you'd hope to avoid that sort of thing, right? Not so, or at least not for thousands of readers of a recent Yahoo! News story about the Eliot Spitzer, which contained a link promising, and showing, a picture of "underage girls" in a keyword mixup that had Yahoo scrambling to clean up its keyword matching algorithms.

The site automatically matches and links up words in news articles with advertisers or with popular searches, highlighting those matching words with the advertiser Web site or search results page. The site also displays a picture when people hover their mouse cursor over the link, a particular problem in this case, since this resulted in images of young girls drinking, in lingerie, and even naked.

Yahoo! has removed that term from its keyword matching algorithm, meaning that particular phrase won't be an issue going forward, but this isn't the first time something similar has happened (an earlier Yahoo! News story about Osama bin Laden showed pictures of Barack Obama). Let's hope it figures out how to teach a computer what's an appropriate link or picture and what isn't. [Source: Associated Press, via Newsvine]

Tags: adult, weird, yahoo news, YahooNews

HuffPost AOL Social News Most Popular