When I saw Oliver Willis' brief note that Conservative news sites think they're being censored by Google, I thought about it a bit. As I said earlier, my Google referrals have dropped precipitously. In fact, as of 10:51 EST, I've seen exactly five from google.com.

I think I understand that, and if I'm right I approve, but I'll get back to that.

The Conservative sites complaining about being censored say it's because of their views on Islam. This is supported by the fact that after reviewing a number of complaints they were found to be hate sites. They present Michelle Malkin and Little Green Footballs' inability to get listed by Google News as further confirmation.

Rather than link them, I'll link the irony found by Roger Ailes.

Because Google had a business relationship with them, they actually got urls from Google identifying "problematic" posts. The commenters at the no-longer-Google-Newsworthy news site say they don't see anything particularly hateful in the articles. But hate doesn't have to be presented bombastically any more than racism must wear a bedsheet. It is essentially irrational though...and the fact is there are far too many adherants of Islam who are not terrorists (or even particularly rude) for the characterization of Islam as the religion of terrorist to be anything but irrational.

Recall the last time this level of anti-government talk went on in Red America. We got the militia movement, and an American citizen committed an act of terrorism against the United States of America that took quite a while to surpass. Right-wing talk radio was excoriated, Rush Limbaugh went underground for a number of years. And those militias, guys running around the woods in camoflage gear doing combat manuvers, faded as an issue. The membership didn't die out, though. They joined the Minutemen.

So I totally support excluding sites that exist soley to keep the base riled up from the list of official news sources, and Google News is as close to that as we every need approach. I can relate a little better to Rielh World View

RWV wasn't indexed by Google News, just by Google Web - as you can see here, they completely dropped me and all my archives from Google about a month ago.

I can't even get an answer, they don't respond. And given the amount of traffic flow they direct over the Internet, I am seriously starting to wonder if any one company should have that much power over information flow without any responsibility to explain their reasoning behind including some sources while excluding others.

You want to talk Big Brother, given Google's success, right now on the Internet they are it. You don't think my base url carnivorous conservative had anything to do with my situation, do ya? I thought maybe it was an advertiser, so I canceled it - still, Google won't respond after numerous attempts.

At the very least given their success and the amount of information they control, along with their obvious willingness to quash it if they disagree, you'd think at the very least they should have some obligation to keep the public informed and treat people decently. Clearly they don't and feel no real obligation to based on my experience.

But I think referring to a gay guy as "Meatstick McGreevy" has more to do with it than having "conservative" in your URL...assuming censorship is involved at all. You have to think about what Google has been doing and what they need to do. The era of blog-dominance of search results may be over. At least I hope it is.

The first thing I found that's going to cut back on referrals from Google is their blog search searches by date now.

Never browse outdated posts again
5/18/2006 06:09:00 PM
Posted by Dave Weissman, Software Engineer, Google Blog Search

Today we launched a new feature on Google Blog Search that lets you narrow your search by date. Using this feature, you can track blog posts on your favorite topics according to when those items were posted. We've also incorporated some improvements in search quality that should make your blog-search experience even better.

Ever since Google Blog Search launched, we've noticed that the universe of blogs has truly exploded--our index is doubling every six months. Perhaps even more striking, though, is that there's no one region in the world that leads the growth of blogs. Self-publishing clearly has global appeal, and blogging makes it easy for everyone on the web to share their voices and connect. True, there continues to be blog spam (and we continue to fight it), but our blog search reveals the great range and quality of ideas and writing out there.

Google has to keep improving the search results, make them more focused.

When blogs first blew up they immediately started dominating search results for several reasons. One reason is the geekitude of the folks that wrote the dominant blogging platforms. They're all highly standards compliant and therefore easy to slurp down and parse mechanically. The major reason, though, is the interconnectedness of blogs. We've known for a long time the number of incoming links have huge impact on your placement. Interblog linkage is inflated by blogrolls, blog leagues, Instalaunches and such-like. Google's search results would be greatly improved if they could filter that sort of stuff out.

And they can. Google Sitemaps is the key. You told them how often you update when you set up your map file. Get the latest page and the previously retrieved page. Extract and sort every unique link in the both pages, compare them and throw away everything that matches. And if you don't set up a sitemap, you're not serious enough for them to worry about.

I hope they're doing this. I'm not trying making money on this sucker, though, so your milage may vary.