Good News From Google

I saw this article at the Search Engine Watch Blog...

Google cleans up news website

The website Playfuls.com (not worthy of a link here) has been continuing to gain visibility in Google News SERPs, fueling criticism from Google News users. This has caused Google to re-examine its database of "news-worthy" (that is, Google Newsworthy) websites and discard some that seem to be ad-heavy or unauthentic, including Playfuls.com.

I have read several articles myself from Playfuls.com, and I think that I always suspected that I could find the same articles somewhere else if I had tried - that is, the particles at Playfuls weren't original to them - but I never really worried about it. In my thinking at the time, news was news, and if it came up in a Google search, then there were usually at least 10 or 20 articles about the same event, the Playfuls article being simply the most prominent.

So, I'm all for Google reviewing its sources; I'm just saying that if the stories are corroborated, then news is news. Google News users (should) know better than to accept some flaky story out there as fact, if it just came from one lonely article on Playfuls.

But then again, I always thought Playfuls was a strange name for a news organization. I usually thought it was some kind of porno-news website, or something similar, until I saw them coming up in all kinds of searches.

Anyway, once again, here's to striving.