Google News now has Zennie62, but still plays news favorites

The great development is that as of August 5th, Zennie62 is on Google News and listed as a blog. This marks the culmination (you can almost hear that assistant coach from American Pie saying "culmination") of over a year of template testing, blogger recruiting, configuration changes,  new blogging techniques, and a whole new media organization, and it's fitting.

It's fitting because the same blog posts this blogger installs at SFGate.com, the website at the San Francisco Chronicle, start at Zennie62.com first. Yet, Google News would treat the SFGate.com version with index priority over the exact same blog version. That's just not right. Both should get the same Google News exposure. And so now that Zennie62.com is on Google News, you'd think that would be the case, right?

It's still not the case. If I post the same content, the SFGate.com version is posted over the Zennie62.com version. I have to make a new blog post about the same subject for both the SFGate.com blog post and the Zennie62.com blog post to appear in the listings. But that's not true for SFGate.com and Bloomberg News, and here's an example to prove it.

In checking the Zennie62.com Google News listing regarding Jodie Fisher and the Mark Hurd Sex Scandal, this blogger cyber stumbled over a dual listing: one post called "Ex-HP Contractor Fisher Says She's "Saddened" by Hurd's Exit" on SFGate.com and Bloomberg.com. What's more, both listings were right next to each other, San Francisco Chronicle over Bloomberg as you can see here:

And that's because SFGate.com and Bloomberg have a content partnership. But there's no "partnership notice" that a publisher must fill out for Google News; this duplicate happened because Google News still irrationally favors news sites over blogs.

The Google response is that an algorithm is responsible for this, but my counter is that the algorithm is a cyber-representation of someone's ideas.

That Zennie62.com is on Google News is a major milestone, but Google News still must replace the "big news website" prejudice that's displayed there from time to time.

Thanks,

Z