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Google News Bug Resurfaces

by Open-Publishing - Thursday 9 February 2006

Internet USA

Evil-doers at work again

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA — (OfficialWire) — 02/09/06 — It was just one year ago that Google, Inc.-the popular online search engine company-attempted to explain [read: blame] the failure to properly index OfficialWire on the numbers in the URL that they claimed were interpreted as dates.
Of course, their explanation wasn’t true or even believable.

The ’indexing-problem’ was first made public in my article, Google News As They See It [Jan 14, 2005]. In any event, after months of problems and numerous emails and faxes, an email was received from "The Google Team"-an un-named sender wrote:

Thank you for your email. We apologize for not responding sooner. After further investigation, we’ve found that our system cannot crawl some of your articles on www.officialwire.com because a few of the article URLs contain a number that looks like year (199x or 200x). This prevents us from successfully crawling your site for new content, as we are unable to detect the most current URL to be crawled.

For example, our news crawler would not crawl articles with the following URLs:

http://news.baou.com/main.php?action=recent&rid=2009
http://news.baou.com/main.php?action=recent&rid=1999

It would crawl these pages:

http://news.baou.com/main.php?action=recent&rid=20095
http://news.baou.com/main.php?action=recent&rid=19992

In regard to your site being indexed on Google News, you can find your articles by clicking on the following link:

 http://news.google.com/news?ie=UTF-...

Please note, we strive to include as many news sources as possible on Google News without any bias. If we can be of any further assistance, please feel free to let us know.

Regards,
The Google Team

Well, one year after "they fixed" the problem and after OfficialWire changed the article numbering sequence, Google News has stopped indexing OfficialWire again.

This time emails requesting an explanation, or the restoration of indexing, have fallen on deaf ears. Indeed, since January 31, 2006 despite numerous attempts to resolve the issue, ’The Google Team’ refuses to answer.

 http://news.baou.com/main.php?actio...