I work for a news organization. Who can answer my questions regarding our news content and the Google News service?

Please contact us. We're pleased to work with individual publishers to ensure their content is appropriately represented in Google News.

Hi,

I'd like to recommend the included URL as a Google News source.  This is a site that has some very intelligent and in-depth political analysis on its front page, including articles written by former intelligence officials.

Thanks!

As one of the poorly educated masses, I have know idea on what basis the right to freedom of speech was viewed by the founders. My guess would be that it was about being able to criticize members of the government.

How that evolved into corporations having the right to "free speech" or how the college student who wanted to distribute anti-gay materials was going to use "freedom of religious expression" as her defense is also something I do not understand.

Sometimes freedom of speech "extremists" sound a lot like 2nd amendment "extremists." Any attempt to control or limit gun ownership is viewed as a toe-hold to the loss of the right to own a weapon. It is challenging.

 I have wondered if it was possible to have freedom from speech. Those who have suggested "freedom of religion" also means "freedom from religion" gave me the idea.

Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music. (George Carlin)

The fact is that three search engines (MSN, Yahoo and Google) control the bulk of the search traffic. Since most people find new (or news) sites by searching, these three engines effectively have control over what gets heard. I wrote about this issue here:

Google Monopoly

If you are not listed in their search database, or are indexed incorrectly you effectively don't exist. As the recent issues with China show, censorship can be caused by the government, commercial interests, or faulty software. The result is the same.

A more dangerous trend is also emerging. Google (and a few other) are attempting to digitize all the world's print literature. What happens in ten years when the libraries have thrown out their paper copies and rely on the one digital copy in the central server. One day the government comes in and says that item can no longer be distributed - poof it's gone. The same thing can happen with iTunes and other digital rights management systems. Stop paying the fee and your personal collection becomes inaccessible.

Liberty and centralization don't work well together.

Policies not Politics
--- Daily Landscape

I haven't even figured out how to get listed in Google Blogs.

Jan

AltaVista, Lycos, and MSN have gone so far as removing potentially offensive search results from their directory and listings. That's in line with similar policies that restrict links to child pornography and spam sites.

Google's approach has been no manual removal of content or pre-screening of sites.  Five years later, it is finally removing some sites.

In other contexts we insist that companies to exhibit good corporate citizenship.  If Google removes sites that go beyond hate-speech into such things as directions for destroying infrastructure or hospitals, or how-to find and murder individuals,  is this not socially responsible behavior on Google's part?  When schoolchildren say they found bomb-making directions via Google, making it easier for them to kill schoolmates, is it enough for Google to say such directions were publicly known, anyway?

Without knowing Google's policies and details about the removed sites, it is hard to judge.  For sure, though, the Republican right promoting censorship may pounce on Google's failure to employ its technology to protect the public even though it will restrict site-access according to the preferences of the Chinese government.