"Link Relevance" Suppressed on Alternative Media by Google

[adam7117]

Hi,

After reading the Flashback: Google: Disabling the Politically Incorrect, I became curious as to what is really going on behind the scenes with Google.

Here is a comment I made under the article.

I am honestly two minds about Google – to what extent we are getting both sides of the story is very questionable. I had a look at Urkut (ahem Uruknet) and it is underwhelming to say the least.

But never mind – there is one sure way to test the theory of Evil Google – let’s submit Signs of the Times to Google News! They seem to invite anyone – so what do you say? This website is so much better than Uruknet and it gets rejected at least, we will have a tangible proof.

What do you think? Is this something that you would be interested in?
It would be a pretty sure way of testing the hypothesis…

 

[Laura]

What do you think? Is this something that you would be interested in?
It would be a pretty sure way of testing the hypothesis…

Sure. How about starting with Don's Economic commentaries? If you know how to do it, either you can do it or you can tell us how. Then, we can announce here whenever we have an original piece to submit (or that has been submitted), and ya'll can keep an eye on it.

 

[adam7117]

OK. I had to take some time to better understand how Google News works.

Google News gathers articles by crawling online news sites. Please be aware that we’re currently unable to accept individual articles, and that we can’t crawl RSS or Atom feeds. If your content appears on an HTML website and you’d like it to be included in Google News, please contact us (http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/request.py) and we’ll review your site.

So it looks like the first step is fairly simple and requires Google staff to physically review the SOTT website. This is the interesting bit where we get to test the Google waters a bit.

It’s also something that we’ll need the site administrator to do. The form is very brief so it shouldn’t take too much time (link in the quote).

Depending on what happens next, we either get in – or – we can try this exercise again by getting everyone to recommend the site! You know, in case they didn’t hear it good. That will really test the hypothesis.

In terms of technical requirements on SOTT’s side, it looks like things should be fine. All pages have unique URL’s with a numerical component, there’s no frames, etc.

Google News does not accept RSS feeds at the moment, nor will it take individual articles. It looks like the whole shebang is just taking off the ground so perhaps it will be possible in the future. On the other hand, that also makes things a lot easier because there will be very little administration involved and the articles will be pulled down automatically by the bots.

In any case, I did find a good way to merge and split RSS feeds from within Google Reader. It’s a news aggregator but also allows two custom feeds to be published by the user.

For example, here is a feed with Economic Commentary cut from the main SOTT feed (only three articles included):
_http://www.google.com/reader/shared/02039710323343085439

Here is a custom feed cut from the mixture of SOTT and Slashdot which I use to record articles of personal interest – perfect for plugging into a blog:
_http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user/02039710323343085439/state/com.google/starred

Anything else I can help you with – just ask ;)