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?
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