Several people have emailed recently asking why Google News does not include Little Green Footballs, so I submitted another request to them yesterday and received the following reply:

Hi Charles,

Thank you for your note. We reviewed littlegreenfootballs.com and cannot include it in Google News at this time. We do not include sites that are purely news aggregators, and we were not able to find any stories on your site that were not from outside sources.

We will log your site for consideration should we alter our policy. Thanks again for taking the time to contact us.

Regards,
The Google Team

I replied, pointing out that LGF has become rather well-known for a story that was not “from an outside source”—Bush Guard Documents: Forged—and offered to give them links to numerous other original pieces we’ve published. Our first request received a reply in less than an hour. So far there’s no response to our second request.

Note that the Google News index now searches quite a few blogs (including Power Line, Polipundit, and Wonkette) and includes other sites with, to say the least, serious credibility problems (including hard-core anarchist site Infoshop, Justin Raimondo’s paleocon antisemitic site antiwar.com, barking moonbat lunatic asylum Democratic Underground, radical Islamic jihadi sites khilafah.com and Jihad Unspun, and extremist pro-Palestinian site electronic intifada).

In this context, Google’s reply to LGF seems rather odd.

UPDATE at 2/5/05 5:13:31 pm:

For another example of a site that passed Google News’ strict standards for inclusion, have a look at morons.org.

UPDATE at 2/6/05 6:35:07 pm:

Michelle Malkin had a similar experience with Google News; she received the same “first excuse” we did. Hmm.

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