rianjs.net

Recently, I've been working on my science website, as I've so often pimped in the past. Well, I decided that I wanted to have Google News index it so it could be added as a news source. I figured it'd be a way to drive traffic and increase exposure. Not a bad idea, right?

Well anyway I submitted it for appoval the other day, and I got a response this morning. Obviously it wasn't the response I was looking for, otherwise, I would be posting about how amazingly awesome and cool Google is. But no, in fact, they suck, and I shall explain why in a moment. Here's the text of the response:

Hi Rian,

Thank you again for your suggestion. We've reviewed your site and cannot include it in Google News at this time. We appreciate your willingness to provide your articles to us, and we'll log your site for future consideration.

Thank you for your interest in Google News.

Regards,
The Google Team

No real reason why. Not that I expected one. So why am I angry? Because of one site that they DO index, that they shouldn't, and I would imagine that of the "4,500 news sources updated continuously" that there are more sites out there that do the same thing.

I am talking about ScienceBlog.com. ScienceBlog rips the text of every single one of their stories directly from another news source. Usually this is a place like eurekalert.org or a government site (NASA, for instance), or another educational site where the material is not explicity copyrighted. In the case of NASA and other government agencies, they cannot copyright what they publish because it is illegal. Scienceblog copies the text from the article verbatim, adds no commentary, and doesn't even provide a link to the original article. The attribution is a tacked on paragraph that will say, for instance, "From NASA."

Let me give you some examples.

Prozac for plants (NASA) | Scienceblog rip
Meteor impacts: Life's jump starter? (Eurekalert) | Scienceblog rip
Neuroscientists match specific thoughts to brain signals (UCLA) | Scienceblog rip

It took me all of two minutes, searching only the news sources that I have in my RSS reader and scienceblog.com's front page to come up with both the originals and the rips. Why and how Google News thinks this is appropriate, and worthy of inclusion in their news service is beyond me, but I am thoroughly disgusted by Scienceblog's copying, and Google for seeing fit to include them as a news source.

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