Uruknet has been re-instated to Google News index after being removed following complaints by Michelle Malkin.

February 22, 2005

Kurt Nimmo writes:

Michelle Malkin Gets Uruknet.info Pulled from Google

I was going to spend an hour or so writing about the absurd news story about the al-Qaeda assassin Ahmed Omar Abu Ali… but then I encountered more serious news.

It appears Google has decided to delist one of my favorite web sites—uruknet.info. I find uruknet.info indispensable, one of the best web sites out there for news focused on Iraq and the Middle East. Apparently uruknet.info was removed from Google’s corporate servers after the concentration camp apologist Michelle Malkin whined about Google not including her blog in its listings.

According to Malkin, the far right-wing and vastly popular blog Little Green Footballs also received a turn down from Google. LGF blogger Charles Johnson, as quoted by Malkin, did some whining of his own: “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, and Justin Raimondo's paleocon antisemitic site antiwar.com).”

Charlie Johnson may not be aware of this but Infoshop and Antiwar are not blogs. In fact, uruknet.info is not a blog either — all three are news sites, same as CNN or Fox News — and should be listed on Google.

Malkin, suffering from the same inability as Johnson to make crucial distinctions, writes the following on her blog:

Yes, and especially so when you see that LGF is excluded from Google News sources while uruknet.info, the nutball news outlet that labeled Alberto Gonzales a “war criminal” and that publishes propaganda reports from Saddam Hussein’s legal team, gets top Google News headline treatment.

Michelle Malkin needs to go back and read the email sent to her from Google — it addresses “news-related blogs or other news-related sites that are written and maintained by a single individual,” not news sites posting articles by various journalists.

Why is Democratic Underground a Google News source, but not LGF?

Because Democratic Underground — regardless of what Malkin thinks of it — is a news site and not a blog like Little Green Footballs or her own blog. Period. End of story.

Or it should be.

Thanks to Malkin’s whiny protestations, uruknet.info was removed from Google, even though it is a news sites and not a blog. Google needs to be consistent — if it is going to remove news sites from its listings, it needs to remove CNN, Fox, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Townhall, where Malkin is often published. In fact, Malkin appears across the corporate media spectrum (Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Miami Herald, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Detroit News, Washington Times, Rocky Mountain News, Philadelphia Daily News, Houston Chronicle, Chicago Sun-Times, and New York Post). Google needs to delist these sources as well.

Malkin and the far right actually have no reason to complain — their views dominate corporate media sources while the progressive left is more often than not ignored and marginalized. Malkin appears on the Fox News site. Question: when was the last time Noam Chomsky was invited to appear there?

“We wrote to Google News but we didn’t receive any reply,” uruknet.info writes about their removal from the search engine.

Malkin at least received a reply.

If this sort of nonsense bothers you, follow this link < http://www.uruknet.info/?p=9891 > to the uruknet.info site and send a complaint email to Google. There’s a link to a complaint form at the bottom of the page.

Addendum

No sooner did I post the above I discovered Google has reinstated Uruknet.info < http://www.uruknet.info/?p=9901 >, probably due to the handy complaint form included on the site. Obviously, Google — even with its momentary lapse of judgment — is able to do what Michelle Malkin cannot: tell the difference between a blog and a news site.

http://kurtnimmo.com/blog/index.php?p=580