Does Donald Knuth use a Microsoft Kin smartphone to track Apple tar balls?

Savvy web sites and bloggers have a dirty little secret: They constantly track the top searches performed on Google and Google News, and use that information to craft stories and headlines that will gain the most traffic. This blog's headline comes to you courtesy of that information; it uses several of the top current "rising searches" on Google News, even though the headline makes no sense at all. And unfortunately, given recent decisions by Yahoo and others, that's the way most news might be in the future.

I was sent the top searches on Google News in the US by category yesterday, and combined several of the "rising search" terms from the Computers & Electronics and Telecom categories to write this blog's headline. It's a nonsense headline, of course. The terms I used were "Donald Knuth," "Microsoft Kin," "smartphone," "Apple," and "tar balls."

If you're not familiar with Donald Knuth, by the way, he's a Professor Emeritus at Stanford University and a pioneer in IT, computer programming, and language analysis. It's not clear at all why he's a "rising search," although it may be because he is a former winner of the Kyoto Prize, and the most recent Kyoto Prize was just awarded to Shinya Yamanaka, a stem cell researcher at the University of California, San Francisco.

As to why "tar balls" is a rising search in the Computers & Electronics category, who knows? Such are the vagaries of Google and people's searching habits.

Why in the future might you see more headlines like the one that graces this blog, and news stories that seem to have no relationship to actual current events? Because of a new business model that uses algorithms and search terms rather than human beings to guide news coverage.

As the New York Times reports, Yahoo has created a news blog called The Upshot that in the words of the Times "will rely on search queries to help guide its reporting and writing on national affairs, politics and the media."

Here's how it works, according to the Times:

Yahoo software continuously tracks common words, phrases and topics that are popular among users across its vast online network. To help create content for the blog, called The Upshot, a team of people will analyze those patterns and pass along their findings to Yahoo's news staff of two editors and six bloggers.

Yahoo was not the first to do this. Entire businesses --- and potentially very profitable ones --- are being built that look for popular search terms, and then pay people rock-bottom rates to craft articles to match those search terms. Bottom-feeding, after all, has a long history of profitability.

Associated Content, which Yahoo recently bought for $100 million does just that. So does Demand Media, which the New York Times says has more than a million instructional articles. Both these sites craft coverage around search phrases and terms such as "How do I teach my dog sign language?"

There is some sense to writing "how to" articles based on search terms, but doing it for news coverage has things exactly backwards. News coverage should tell people what they need to know, and what's important, and that's not something an algorithm or raw counts of search terms can determine. That's something  human beings with experience in news coverage can best determine. If search term popularity were the determining factor in news coverage, it would be all Linday Lohan and Roswell aliens all the time. (By the way, as I write this, the lead story on The Upshot is about --- you guessed it --- the 63rd anniversary of the Roswell incident. Stop the presses! Ooops, forget that phrase. Wrong century.)

Given the harsh economics of the news business, I expect that more and more, algorithms will replace editors, and trash news will replace real news.

All that being said, I'm currently planning my next blog post. How about "Woot sells mobile Facebook logins and Twitter tips to Steve Jobs using Verizon Wireless in China." Has a nice ring to it, don't you think?