the strange complaint that wouldn't die

Andrew Orlowski seems to be bent on "proving" that weblogs are bad for google and that they should be removed from the main index somehow. Ridiculous. Forget about the obvious technical problems in defining what is a weblog from the POV of a bot (for example, if a company is updating information frequently on a 'news' page, is that a weblog, and if so, how would google know? Because it has an RSS feed? would that remove the NYT or News.com too?)

Weblogs are what makes the web what is is today. If you remove weblogs from google, you remove the web. Think about it. We'd end up with the same static environment we had 5 years ago. Google indexes the web today. If the web today is dynamic because of weblogs, then that's how it should be. The "fact" that weblogs are "polluting" the rest of the results is because a lot of
"respected" news sources have their archives closed. Furthermore, webloggers know how to get around that when they have to; and besides, who's to say when a result is the right result? Isn't that completely context dependent? What the query "mobile phone" means for me might be diametrically different from what it means for someone else. Who's to say who is an authority on something after all, particularly on topics that are new and on which there's not a lot of information? Weblogs give you timely, updated information on things that (often) mainstream media doesn't care about. Why is that a bad thing again? And why shouldn't it be at the top of google? Isn't the context of the search what defines when a result is correct? If anything, we have to go further in providing contextual, "semantic" search, and I'm sure google and the other search engines are working on that.

Dave said, if you want to be on google, you gotta be on the web (More info here). Dave's opinions are sometimes contentious, but I think that everyone would agree that on this one he is absolutely, 100% right on the mark. Weblogs are part of the web. There isn't any way around that. And if you don't like it, well, fine, get a weblog and complain about it. :-)