Just because bloggers have a had a hit or miss experience with getting into the Yahoo News and Google News indexes, and because Google’s Blogger is now a spam haven, does not mean they would ever remove anyone from the search index.

News pages are not removed from search because they are also in News, and groups are not removed from the search index because they are in the Groups search.

Google has stated many times they want to have a complete search index. They would never–NEVER–take content out of the index. It’s against everything they stand for!

Now, the problems we all face (Weblogs, Inc. included) in understanding and getting into the Yahoo News and Google News are real. However, I can tell you it is not some sinister plot by either firm, but rather the fact that they are “figuring it out.”

I’ve had many–like dozens–of conversations with folks at both firms about why they have Huffington Post on their site but not us (it’s a test deal), or why some of our blogs are in the news index and not others.

Yahoo has rebooted their whole content group as everyone knows (you can read all about this over at paidcontent.org). They are figuring out what their new model will be while they deal with their last model (paying for content to put on their site!). I think you’ll see more transparency from Yahoo shortly.

Google News does a good job overall adding folks to the index. 99% of blogs are not “news” sources, we all know that. However, many are becoming news sources (like the Blog Herald, Engadget, Autoblog, etc). I’ve found that if you’re persistent–and polite/reasonable–with the folks at Google News you’ll get good results.

In short, you’re concerns about blogs being left out of the *search* index are not even close to valid. You’re 100% wrong. Google and Yahoo would not remove blogs from the index because a) it’s against their stated mission, b) it would cause a huge backlash, c) they’ve never excluded anything before, and d) it would be bad for business.

You’re concerns about Yahoo and Google News are very real and valid and I think Yahoo and Google should put up pages stating what their policies are.

best j

Bob Wyman says that the figure of 100 million blogs will be reached this year. It’s a market no ISP can ignore. With RSS in IE next year blogs will become increasingly important to the whole internet.

BTW Duncan, Jason specifically says he doesn’t want blogs separated from general search but a Technorati-style service that works like Google. I’m pretty sure that’s what we’ll get, and probably from Technorati itself. Competition works wonders in these cases ~ see Dave Sifry’s comment on my blog, and on various others around the blogosphere.