Wampum

The Goggling Monkeys this evening led me to a site called FactBites, which aggregates stories from mainstream media, blogs, organizational press releases and governmental sources. The orginal Goggling string was "Gale Norton", but seeing that I had the option to put in anyone's name, I tried out Steven Griles.

About twenty entries came up, mostly on Griles' actions in Interior on behalf of oil, gas and mining interests. But near the end, this NYTimes headline jumped out at me:

Ex-Interior Deputy Testifies Lobbyist Offered Him Job

Two days ago, I posted on the same subject, having read through most of the Senate Indian Affairs documents relating to Abramoff's contacts with Interior regarding tribal gaming. I wasn't aware that the Times had reported on it, as when I did a search on the related terms (Abramoff, Griles, job, etc.), I came up blank.

I then noticed something strange about the excerpted bullet points under the Times title on FactBites:

The official, former Deputy Secretary J. Steven Griles, insisted in testimony to a hearing of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee that there was nothing improper in his ties to Mr.

Griles, who left the department to set up his lobbying firm, acknowledged the offer after being confronted by the committee chairman, Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, with an e-mail message from Sept. 9, 2003, by Mr.

Griles, the former official insisted he did not have a special relationship with Mr.

Abramoff's name had been scrubbed from the section, even though it was present in the original article. In fact, it appeared nowhere on the page.

My spouse (of the somewhat blonde persuasion) quipped when I informed him of the deletion:

"How can you tell a blonde had been working on your computer?"

"Wite-out on the screen."

[Honestly, no offense to blondes, bottled or otherwise.]

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Update: The "respected alternative to Google for encyclopedia-style searches. [marketing lingo from Rapid Intel, FactBites' data mining content monging parent somewhere in Oz] has a truncation bug. The search presentation string is terminated when it encounters a "Mr." or "MR." Bug report sent to coders-in-oz. ebw.