Google News trying to mislead readers

by Srabanti majumder
March 3, 2010

http://www.weeklyblitz.net/571/google-news-trying-to-mislead-readers

LATEST: Google News Team has finally responded to Weekly Blitz mail. They said: "We apologize for not responding to your email notifications about this issue, but your messages were caught by our spam filter. Please be assured that we've made the necessary changes in our system to ensure that future incoming messages from your publication would not be filtered.

We reviewed your site and have removed the [blog] designation for it in Google News."

Despite repeated requests, search engine Google's popular news site has suddenly started mentioning Weekly Blitz, a tabloid newspaper published since 2003 as a 'blog'.

Management of Weekly Blitz sent repeated requests to Google News drawing their attention to such serious mistake. It may be mentioned here that, Weekly Blitz news are crawled by Google News for past several years, while only since middle of 2009, Google News suddenly started labelling Weekly Blitz as a blog, which not only hampers the image of this most influential anti-Jihadist newspaper in the Muslim nation, but also greatly misleads its readers.

No explanation was ever sent from Google News to justify the reason of terming Weekly Blitz newspaper as a blog. It is apprehended that some vested interest group having inclination towards Jihadists and religious fanatics might have somehow managed certain section of people in Google News in placing the status of Weekly Blitz as a blog.

Meanwhile, readers of Weekly Blitz are preparing to go for an online petition with the aim of protesting such dubious actions of Google News.

Google News is an automated news aggregator provided by Google Inc. The initial idea, StoryRank—related to Google's PageRank formula—was developed by Krishna Bharat in 2001, the Principal Research Scientist of Google.

Google Inc. is a multinational public cloud computing and Internet search technologies corporation. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program. The company was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while the two were attending Stanford University as Ph.D. candidates. It was first incorporated as a privately held company on September 4, 1998, with its initial public offering to follow on August 19, 2004. The company's stated mission from the outset was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", and the company's unofficial slogan – coined by Google engineer Paul Buchheit – is Don't be evil. In 2006, the company moved to their current headquarters in Mountain View, California.

Google is a corporation that compiles information and makes it searchable via the Internet. Google's stated mission is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," but this mission, and the means used to accomplish it, have raised concerns among the company's critics. The policies and practices for which Google has been criticized include its use of others' intellectual property, concerns that its compilation of data may violate people's privacy, censorship of search results, and the energy consumption of its servers. Much of the criticism of Google pertains to issues that have not yet been addressed by cyber law.

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