The No.2 Yahoo

Last month's Yahoos' post, Yahoos of War and NFTs (April 2022), was the second since Russia invaded Ukraine, thereby starting a war between two of the world's premier chess powers. The chess aspect is a detail about the conflict; it might not be an important fact, but it's nevertheless a fact. (See the footnote below for an explanation of Yahoos.)

The end-month Google news search returned 100 stories for May, of which 94 stories first appeared during the month. Of the 51 different sources behind those 94 stories, seven sources accounted for two or more stories. These are shown in the chart on the left.

For the first time that I can remember, a news source other than Chess.com tallied at least ten stories, with ChessBase accounting for exactly ten. At the beginning of the year, I calculated that ChessBase was the no.2 news source for the year 2021 -- see A Year of Yahoos (January 2022) -- so their visibility in May was not an accident. [NB: In March this year, Google switched from calling the source 'ChessBase News' to the simpler 'ChessBase'.]

As far as Google News is concerned, ChessBase is doing something right. For the record, following are the titles of the ten ChessBase stories. The original pages can be located by entering a title in a normal Google search.

• 'Richard Rapport joins Romanian Chess Federation'
• 'New: Herman Grooten: Key Concepts of Chess - Pawn Structures Vol. 1 + 2'
• 'Chess Classics - Reti's Masters of the Chessboard'
• 'How chess is helping a Ukrainian player to cope with the war' • WIM Anastasiya Rakhmangulova
• 'Studies with Stephenson' • Brian Stephenson
• 'Young refugees learning chess in the US'
• 'Asa Hoffmann, New York chess hustler'
• 'Remembering Machgielis "Max" Euwe on his 121st birth anniversary'
• 'Congratulations! Andy Soltis turns 75 - an interview'
• 'Maxime Lagarde wins French blitz championships, Laurent Fressinet is best in rapid'

Two of those stories have something to do with the Russia - Ukraine war: 'Richard Rapport' and 'Ukrainian player'. The story 'Young refugees' is about a different conflict in another part of the world: 'Afghan refugee children in the US are helped through chess with the help of GM Elshan Moradiabadi.'

Chess.com had three stories related to the war, while Chess24.com had none. Those numbers don't necessarily reflect the number of stories reported by the sources. They might mean that Google chose not to return other war-related stories.

Another source on my list of two or more stories, 'The Sentinel Assam', hasn't been seen before. The domain bills itself as 'The Largest Media group of North-East India'. One of its stories, 'T20 getting to be similar to a chess game', was about cricket.

[Yahoos (mainstream news stories about chess) are derived from Google News top-100 (or so) stories from the past month.]