Daily Kos dumps Google News

Popular political blog site Daily Kos has asked to be removed from the listings that appear on the Google News site, saying the site is "unusable."

"I voluntarily asked for Daily Kos to be removed from Google News since it was returning results from this site that quite frankly weren't up to the sort of standards I expect out of a service offering up credible news," Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas Zuniga wrote in a posting on Friday.

"Google News is becoming unusable. They need some serious soul-searching about what they are and what their mission is," he writes. "A 'news' operation needs to present news, and credible news at that. That means get rid of the blogs (mostly opinion), get rid of the no-name sites, the conspiracy sites, and the rest of that crap."

Google spokeswoman Sonya Boralv couldn't comment on the specific situation, but said Google is "always happy to remove any source from Google News that does not wish to be included."

The criteria for evaluating sources for Google News includes: regular updates to the posted content; the source is an organization and not an individual; the content does not include hate speech or pornography; and the source conducts editorial reviews of the content, Boralv said. In addition, the source's Web site needs to be "technically conducive to inclusion," she said.