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Thursday, June 01, 2006

Is Google promoting racism?

One of the news sources that I use for this Blog is Google News - it has some nice search and RSS features that make monitoring a topic easy.

The famously secretive Google do not reveal how they decide what sites to include in Google News - punters can recommend sources but how sites make the cut is unknown. I have several friends and contacts in the media world who run very good and legitimate news sites who are very frustrated that Google News will not index their sites - so however they make their choices they are clearly very selective.

A few months ago one of my Google News feeds threw up a link to the British National Party. Let's not beat about the bush here - the BNP is not a legitimate source of news it's a racist political party. I used Google's feedback forms to tell them this, but unsurprisingly got no response.

Today I have again come across a link from Google News to the BNP.

Google News points out that it chooses news "without regard to political viewpoint or ideology". It also allegedly lives by the moto "Do no evil". The BNP are not a news source and they are demonstrably evil - so why the fuck do Google continue to lend them legitimacy by linking to their drivel?

I've again informed Google of inappropriate nature of BNP links ...but have also decided to post this item so that others are at least aware of this shit.

EDIT:
I guess I should have searched Google News before I ranted off!
I just came across this Press Gazette article where the BNP issue is mentioned.
The register have also covered this issue in 2004 - so I guess that means that Google just don't give a shit.

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