CHAPTER 11
A Ghost on the Web
WHAT DO UNDERAGE girls have to do with New York’s governor? More important, what do they have to do with millions of Yahoo! readers? That’s what a lot of people wondered when Yahoo! posted a news article about the disgraced Eliot Spitzer’s dalliance with prostitutes—and then offered its audience a link to more information, including photos of “underage girls.”
Big problem.
The problem originated with a predictive intelligence technology that Yahoo! had developed called Shortcuts. With Shortcuts, Yahoo! highlighted certain words in news stories and automatically linked them to popular searches. Unfortunately, Shortcuts learned more about human nature than we might want it to know—specifically, that many searchers ...
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