Article missing from front page?

[CarlJ]

I ran across an article on reddit about Apple's possible plans to build a search engine, then did a double take when I noticed that it linked to MacRumors, as I did not recall seeing that article go by on the front page.

Apple Pushing to Launch Search Engine to Rival Google​

Monday December 19, 2022 3:03 am PST​

So, I scrolled through macrumors.com. The "missing" article was posted Monday at 3:03am.

And I see this posted at 3:52am:

Apple Reportedly Quits NFL Sunday Ticket Streaming Negotiations​

Monday December 19, 2022 3:52 am PST​

Preceded by this posted at 1:00am:

The 'Trashcan' Mac Pro: Remembering One of Apple's Most Controversial Designs Nine Years Later​

Monday December 19, 2022 1:00 am PST​

I would think the missing article would appear between these two.

Going through my settings, the only thing I have checked in "News Preferences" is "Deals" under "Page 2 Stories". That shouldn't affect this article.

And now, going through the sidebar, I see the article is listed under "Other Stories".

Why is that? Do you want most people to not see this story? It seems like it scores pretty high on "Apple related" and "rumor" - higher than a bunch of stories that have gone by recently about Twitter and such, and it's not a topic ("Apple is working on an online search engine") that has come up recently - most recent mentions have been in the context of work on Siri. I can't gauge how much interest there is in the story here since the story was posted with no ability to comment.

I had previously thought that reading down the front page until I ran into a story I had already seen was sufficient, since you got rid of the original page 2 and page 3 sections ("Mac news" and "iOS news", if I recall correctly). Is that no longer the case? Especially since you have settings I can tweak to remove some items from the main feed, I would expect anything not specifically removed would show by default.

It was just weird finding an interesting MacRumors story only from it being referenced on Reddit - and the reference to it over there currently has 830 comments.

 

[WildCowboy]

There is a subset of articles we publish that do not appear in our main news feed because they are primarily intended for other audiences such as users on social media like Facebook or to be found via search. This specific article does not contain any new information, as it's based on a November report that we covered at the time, just with a different angle/spin.

For the most part, these articles fly under the radar of our regular readers, which is largely our intent given they are not the normal sort of news articles. But every once in a while one gets some extra visibility, most often by someone posting it on reddit as happened in this case.

 

[ignatius345]

I ran across this as well, but with Apple News. I was a little disappointed because I was hoping to find a forum thread about this story -- which really didn't seem like any kind of departure from usual MacRumors content.