According to Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan, the display of bets about the future on his prediction market platform is “the most accurate thing we have as mankind right now, until someone else creates some sort of a super crystal ball.”
And if you went to Google News earlier this week seeking a super crystal ball (because a regular crystal ball isn’t good enough I guess), you got your wish, because, as Futurism pointed out, it was displaying Polymarket bets as if they were valid news stories.
But Google told the Verge on Saturday that this was happening “in error,” and it’s been fixed.
Bet titles made for clunky headlines like “Will ChatGPT Be Out as the #1 Free App in the US Apple Store by April 10?” At the same time, that is a somewhat intriguing and clickable title. It’s so weirdly specific when you don’t know the context.
According to Google’s explanation of the inner workings of Google News, it displays information algorithmically determined to be relevant based on your other Google behavior. So it’s a safe bet someone’s individual fascination with Polymarket would have played a role in whether or not bets were displayed as news stories.
Google told the Verge that its news product “is designed to show sources that create content about current issues, events, and important topics, and we have policies for sites to be eligible to appear.”
