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Wednesday, June 06, 2007

More evidence of bias at Google News

I've talked about Google News before and how it has an unfortunate tendency to index hate sites and anti-semitic articles as "news."

For fun, I decided to submit my site as a news site and see what they would respond. Here's the reply back from Google:
Thank you for your note. We reviewed http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com and
are unable to include it in Google News at this time. We currently only
include articles from sources that could be considered organizations
,
generally characterized by multiple writers and editors, availability of
organizational information, and accessible contact information. When we
reviewed your site we weren't able to find this evidence of an
organization.


We appreciate your willingness to provide your articles to us, and we'll
log your site for future consideration.

Thank you for your interest in Google News.

Regards,
The Google Team

That's all well and good, as long as they are consistent about it.

Well, they aren't.

Google News indexes a "peace" blog (Google says it is called "Baqa'a Refugee Camp, UK", while the blog itself calls itself "Desert Peace" and is based out of Jerusalem. )

Like me, he uses an alias; like me, he has no organization behind him. But unlike me, he is unremittingly critical of Israel and religious Jews, yet hardly has a bad word to say about Arab terrorists not Islamists.

"Desert Peace" is not generally a hate site (except against Orthodox Jews) and I wouldn't put it in the same category as the slime that comes out of some other Google News indexed websites like The People's Voice or Uruknet.

But if that site is considered a news site, why is mine not?