May 20, 2008

On May 7 we published Google’s reply where Google wrote, "We currently don't include sites that are primarily news aggregators". This is FALSE, of course. [See below]

Today – after several attempts to have more information on the arbitrary exclusion of Uruknet from Google News – Google was kind enough to reply again:

Hi Vincenzo,
Thank you for your reply and for providing us with this additional information about your site. We apologize for our delayed response. As we mentioned in our previous email, we currently don't include sites that are primarily news aggregators. Please be assured, however, that we'll log your site for future consideration.
Also, if you know of a site that you think shouldn't be included in Google News, please send us the URL of the site in question and we’ll look into it.

We sincerely appreciate your interest in Google News.

Regards, The Google Team

Google keeps lying but, as bad as this surely is, it’s not even the worst part in this Orwellian e-mail. The Google Team now would like to engage Uruknet as its informer?????????????

After embracing censorship and self-censorship , we wonder if delation is now officially Google’s policy.






Google's Censors Reply At Last!
URUKNET

"The Israel 60 Birthday Website will combat Palestine, Iran, Nazi and Syria sites which have started to attack Israel’s 60th birthday by enjoying a stronger search engine optimization (SEO) marketing and public relations ranking on Google and appearing throughout the Net using all of the tools of Web 2.0." The Israeli News Agency.

May 7, 2008

After more than ten days and many e-mails we sent, Google News replies at last:

Hi Enzo,

Thank you for your note. We received numerous complaints from users about your site and after reviewing it we've found that we could no longer include it in Google News. We currently don't include sites that are primarily news aggregators, and we weren't able to find any stories on your site that weren't from outside sources. We apologize for any inconvenience this situation may cause. Please be assured that we'll log your site for future consideration should our requirements change

Thanks for your interest in Google News.

Regards, The Google Team

***

We thank The Google Team for their kind reply, however:

1) The Google Team does not say which kind of complaints they received and from whom;

2) The Google Team writes: "we weren't able to find any stories on your site that weren't from outside sources". Probably The Google Team didn’t look up carefully since Uruknet publishes regularly original articles ( just a few minutes ago we posted this one) . Moreover, many articles we publish are sent us by their authors for publication and Uruknet links to their blogs and websites for fairness.

3) The Google Team writes "We currently don't include sites that are primarily news aggregators." This is patently false because Google News does include a lot of websites that are primarily or exclusively news aggregators. While a few of them hide the original source, most of them openly quote the link to the original source as we do. Of course we don’t name these websites because we don’t want to give them problems with Google, but one can easily find them on Google News ;

4) Finally, being this the forth time just in a couple of years Google News stopped indexing Uruknet.info, we acknowledge that every single time Google gave us a different reason.