By “best” Huffington does not mean the one that represents the story better. The question is not “Was this headline accurate?” but “Was it clicked more than the others?” The headlines must work for the publisher, not the reader. Yahoo!’s homepage, for example, tests more than 45,000 unique combinations of story headlines and photos every five minutes.6 They too pride themselves on how they display the best four main stories they can, but I don’t think their complicated, four-years-in-the-making algorithm shares any human’s definition of that word.
