Google News Takes Heat Over Blog Exclusions

Google is getting smacked for removing conservative e-zines and blogs from Google News. To date, Google has done a poor job of explaining why certain blogs are enshrined and others aren't. They need to publish some standards around who they are willing to include and why. Topix.net has been public about this as has Yahoo. Both include many blogs in their news crawls.

Technorati Tags: Google, Yahoo, Google+News, Topix

Comments

[Mike Orren]

Here's what they told us:

"Thank you for your note. We've reviewed http://www.texasgigs.com/blogs but
can't include it in Google News at this time. We're unable to include
articles that don't have a formal editorial-review process. We appreciate
your taking the time to contact us, and we'll log this page for
consideration should our requirements change."

They DID accept our news section, however. I didn't have the energy to explain to them that both had the same editorial process, and were differentiated only by format/section.

[Danny Sullivan]

Steve, despite your link, Yahoo is no more public about what gets into Google News than Yahoo. That Yahoo link is simply Yahoo saying that Yahoo blog search results run alongside the completely separate Yahoo News search results. So where's the list of all sources in Yahoo News and who and what gets in there? Nada. Yahoo News does have some blogs in its crawl; so does Google News; neither explains exactly when a blog crosses over to be considered a "news" source.

[Bob Morris]

The linked article said Google dropped the sites because of hate speech. They then said this was proof of a sinister Leftie conspiracy and completely ignored the hate speech issue, a bit shoddy and misleading, you ask me.

I mean, they call MoveOn.org "ultra-left" when in fact MoveOn is a PAC that primarily raises money for the Democratic Party and are hardly radical - which gives a good indication this is a hard Right site doing the kvetching.

That Google donated to MoveOn to lobby for Net Neutrality isn't proof of anything either. Lots of hard Right and Religious Right organizations also are lobbying for Net Neutrality.

Does censorship sometimes happen? Sure. Does Google have a right to not spider sites they consider having hate speech? Absolutely.

[Ed Kohler]

It looks like they wrote a news story to match a headline based on one-sided research to me.

A "fair and balanced" report would have looked at other reasons why Google News has dropped sites, but that may have contradicted the writer's agenda.

Has Google dropped some conservative sites? Yes. Have they dropped liberal sites? Um, we didn't look into that for this story. Kinda makes me wonder whether they're really, "documenting, exposing and neutralizing liberal media bias," or if they're just working the ref.