Category: Lab
Share News on Facebook Canada Support
Bing Delay in Indexing a New Post
I was recently contacted by an independent Canadian news publisher who is using Share News on Facebook. The tool allows them to get around Facebook’s filter on Canadian news. They came to me with an issue sharing new posts that I resolve here.
Problem. The publisher created a new post. The tool generated a Bing search link featuring just one result, a link to the news story. However, it was observed that the one result was to the publisher’s homepage instead of the specific news story. The result auto-corrected later that day.
Cause. Search engines like Bing may have a delay in indexing a new post, especially if it is on a website that is not Search Engine Optimized. The delay can be seconds, hours, or days.
Resolution. The publisher can perform SEO to speed up indexing, or they can index a new page manually by submitting it to the Bing URL Submission Tool. To use the tool, the publisher must sign-up for Bing’s Webmaster Tools and upload an XML file to their root directory. See this article for detailed steps.
Share News on Facebook Canada
In June 2023, the Canadian government introduced Bill C-18, the Online News Act, compelling digital giants, such as Meta and Google, to compensate news publishers for the use of their content. Meta responded to the bill by blocking all news links on Facebook Canada. Google reached a compensation deal with news publishers, and continues to allow access to news on its platform.
Some websites offered workarounds that redirected links, but Facebook blocked them. This website provides a different type of workaround that transforms a news link into a Bing search with only one result. Facebook will not block Bing.
Kindle Sharing Limits Workaround using Google Lens
The Kindle and other e-readers are generally terrific for sharing quotes and text snippets for research, but they have unfortunate limitations too. The Kindle does not allow a reader to select or share footnotes. It also blocks you from sharing text if the selection is too long or if you have shared too much from a given book.
You can snap and share a photo of the screen with your camera, but the photo is greyscale and unsuited to editing for research. An effective workaround is a Optical Character Recognition app. I use the free Google Lens Text mode on my Android phone.
- Open the Google Lens app on your phone (or tap the Google Lens icon inside your phone’s camera app if available).
- Point your camera at the text you want to copy.
- Tap the “Text” button at the bottom of the screen.
- The text will be highlighted on the screen. You can then select a larger section by dragging the circles at the ends of the highlighted text.
- Tap “Copy” from the menu that appears above the highlighted section.
- The copied text can be shared and edited.