Google News Labels Some Sources As "Blogs"

Google News Labels Some Sources As “Blogs”

Sep 18, 2009 at 8:30am ET by Barry Schwartz

The Google News blog announced that they have begun labeling some sites, sites they consider to be a “blog” as blogs in the Google News search results. For example, here is a snap shot of how Google labels this site in Google News.

How does Google determine which site is a blog versus a newspaper? Google really doesn’t say. It is useful when trying to see which NY Times article is from the main paper and which is from their blog. But would this insult some writers? Is this a move to play nice with the newspapers?

Related Topics: Channel: Content | Google: News

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz

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ronabop

Are you required to fact check your articles?
Are opinions being expressed, rather than information (which may be opinionated)?
Is your work vetted through editors and proofreaders before publishing?

Blogging and Journalism are not the same thing.
http://searchengineland.com/ Danny Sullivan

Ron, it’s rare to find a newspaper that fact checks. Trust me, i know. I’ve been quoted in hundreds of articles — few papers ever, ever call to fact check. Usually, it’s only magazines — and these are rare.

No, blogging and journalism aren’t the same thing. But just because you publish news using a blog platform doesn’t make you not “news.”

It’s a tough call for Google to make. Here at Search Engine Land, we’ve fall in both the news and blog camps (in fact, that’s why Google has put us in both news and blog search for some time). We’re called a blog simply because of our publishing tool. That’s it.

I’ve go no doubt if I raise the issue, I can lose the blog annotation that’s been attached to us (and Google encourages people to do this, if they want). I’m just not sure if I want to or not.