With the line between blogs and mainstream media (or MSM for short) getting blurrier by the day, it was not a surprise a few years ago to see highly trafficked blogs being cited at news sources on Google News.
Although many hailed this as another victory for bloggers, others argued that including opinionated voices would generally hurt Google News with people presenting their viewpoint as if it were the only acceptable reality.
Now it seems that the search engine king has removed many of these blogs from its listings as news sources, which may not make too many people happy.
Not too long ago, sites like Jihad Watch, Muslim Wakeup, Iraq The Model, Democratic Underground, Polipundit, etc. were all regularly cited and “grouped” as news sources next to CNN, Fox News, NBC, etc.
Even relatively young sites such as Hot Air (which is barely a year old) were included as Google News sources.
Now it seems that a quick search on Google News for any of these blogs brings up nothing at all.
Perhaps the search engine king is attempting to “restore value” within Google News by only including websites that are consistently producing original content, as opposed to most blogs which generally analyze content.
Although some weblogs (like Powerline Blog) are still indexed, Google may be in the process of moving highly opinionated sites off the general news shelf and into their blog search engine.
While some may decry this maneuver, this may bring about some “fresh air” to Google News as it was quickly turning into a “shouting ground” full of emotional opinions, instead of general reports of what is happening around the world.
Although blogs have proven themselves to the media and the world as credible sources (as one only has to look at Engadget to verify this) it may be to everyone’s benefit of separating the two, at least online.
Note: In a weird twist of fate, even The Blog Herald seems to have been filtered out from Google’s ranks. Ironic, isn’t it?
Author: Darnell Clayton
Darnell Clayton is a geek who discovered blogging long before he heard of the word “blog” (he called them “web journals” then).
When he is not tweeting, friendfeeding, or blogging about space, he enjoys running, reading and describing himself in third person.
Maybe Google do this to enhance his blogsearch?
I’m sure Google was testing something when they did all this. They probably have something cooking in the servers.
Seems to make sense to me. Blogs on blogsearch. News on news sites.
You guys stopped covering the news here a long time ago
~Matt
Doesn’t matter what google does. Bloggers will always have the upper hand. Had it not been for a blogger the news media wouldn’t be verifying and rechecking it’s information production. Bloggers keep the news grounded. It’s not supposed to be about ratings. Same thing goes for the web. It’s for the love of blogging.
Will will over ourselves. No need for Google. The revolution has begun
Couldn’t help yourself, could you Matt?