The company removed Uruknet from Google News

Jan 22, 2007 15:27 GMT  ·  By

Google News is a service developed by the search giant that receives news from sources located in the entire world and organizes them on multiple categories, publishing them on a single website. The solution tends to become more and more popular as it receives headlines from the most important news services in the world. All you need to do is visit the official website of the product, choose your favorite category and start reading latest news. Although the company tried to avoid potential problems caused by copyright by publishing the name and the link to the original source, it seems like Google is now accused of censorship after a news provider was removed from the service.

Uruknet is a website that publishes latest headlines directly on its page but also sends the news to Google News to index them on the product's site. After several bans in the past, Uruknet was removed again from Google's service, the owners of the website attacking the search giant for censorship. Even if Uruknet's founders said they contacted the company several times, Google's employees avoided to provide a reason for the ban, adding that the company will include Uruknet in the upcoming crawl process.

Google is not playing by those unwritten rules, according to an article from Uruknet, posted at Michael Rivero's What Really Happened website. Uruknet's claim is that "On January 12, 2007 Google has stopped indexing Uruknet.info as a news source." So they contacted the Google folks and were reportedly told that, "We apologize for the confusion; we've reviewed your site again and are unable to include it in Google News at this time."

Uruknet's response is incredulity: "They are unable? and for which reason? Of course there isn't any technical reason, because Google.news have been indexing Uruknet up to five days ago and although old pages are still available, there has been no update since then. The only 'technical reason' is censorship," FreeMarketNews reported.