World Championship Yahoos 2024 (1/2)

For last month's Yahoos post, A Press of Yahoos (October 2024; if you're wondering, 'What means "Yahoos"'?; see the footnote), I wrote,

This month's 97 stories -- 10 of them old stories from previous months -- lacked a clear favorite.

This month's post had more than 100 stories on the World Chess Championship (WCC) that started this week in Singapore and zero old stories. How can there be more than 100 WCC stories when the footnote says 'top-100 (or so)'?

That's an easy calculation: the first page of results had 91 stories, of which 37 were not about the WCC, leaving 54 WCC stories. That first page included a header titled 'D Gukesh vs Ding Liren World Chess Championship', leading to a second page with 57 stories.

Of the 54 WCC stories, which one received top placement on the first page of results? None of them. The top story was:-

• 2024-11-28: World Chess Championship 2024: How the immediate thrill of Bullet Chess transforms the game completely (independent.co.uk) • 'Bullet chess is a faster and more frenetic version of the classical version, reformed obsessive of the game Richard Hall writes.'

Although the title says, 'World Chess Championship 2024', there's nothing in the story about the Singapore event. After bullet chess, which WCC story was on top? Same answer: None of them.

Second in the results was a section titled 'Google releases GenChess, a chess game with AI-generated pieces', with three different stories. The most relevant of those was:-

• 2024-11-27: Google’s new chess game lets you customize pieces with AI (theverge.com) • 'Google has released a new chess website that puts one fun twist on the game: it uses custom pieces that are created each time by generative AI.' • The phrase 'new chess website' led to a site that didn't work: GenChess (labs.google/genchess; 'This tool is not available to users under the age of 18 or in certain countries or regions.')

The link to the second page was here, followed by the rest of the stories, WCC or not. Of those not-WCC stories, six more were about Google's 'AI-generated pieces' and three were about a freestyle (chess960) match between GMs Carlsen and Caruana. Of the other not-WCC stories, my favorite was:-

• 2024-11-19: The Chess Revolution: Understanding The Power Of An Ancient Game In The Digital Age (chess.com; PeterDoggers) • 'My book The Chess Revolution tells the story of how chess impacted our Western culture, and how it was impacted itself by the computer and the Internet. It is for chess fans but definitely also for non-chess playing readers. I am super excited that almost two years after starting this project, the book hit book stores in October. Let me tell you more about it and the writing process.'

For the equivalent post after last year's World Championship match, see World Championship Yahoos 2023 (April 2023). I'm titling this post 'WCC Yahoos 2024 (1/2)', because I'm expecting another deluge of WCC Yahoos at the end next month.

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