jatiN mahindrA doT coM

Google News is now labeling certain publications as blogs in search results. I’m not sure exactly how long it has been like this, but I noticed it for the first time today. In the past they have separated "news" and "blogs" on some results pages, but in what I’m talking about now, the results are mixed together, but some publications have "(blog)" written beside their names.

You can see a few examples here:

The system clearly has some flaws. Notice for example, in the above screenshot, Marketing Pilgrim is not labeled as a blog. Nothing against Marketing Pilgrim, but it is clearly a blog. This is even acknowledged on Marketing Pilgrim’s own about page.

Now let’s look at this sample New York Times piece that is listed in Google News results (obviously not as a blog):

Look at the style of this article. It’s nothing more than a couple paragraphs that link out to none other than a New York Times-based BLOG. Now I’m not insinuating that the New York Times is merely a blog. Clearly it is a well-established, respected, and historical publication. But their site certainly has some blog-like tendencies, not to mention actual blogs (like Bits, which is linked to in the above example, and clearly considers itself a blog).

So I guess this opens up the ever-popular debate about what is classified as a blog. Is it based on journalism credentials? If so, then are you sure all of the publications without the blog label meet this criteria? What do you think? Share your thoughts.

This is no doubt a move aimed at appeasing the big publishers, at least to some extent. Still, I think the system has some holes.

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