The other day, I wrote a blog column for Huffington. I later posted the same column to two other web-sites. Then I noticed a strange thing. The header for my column on the other, smaller sites was immediately indexed by the Google robot and appeared, in minutes, on Google News. But the original Huffington source did not appear in Google at all.
I thought that was simply because the Huffington editors felt my piece was unworthy of being featured on their Politics page. But today I searched for other Huffington headers. Even the largest headlines are ignored by Google News.
This apparently doesn't represent any political bias. One site that receives immediate Google indexing is distinctively "far Left" in tone, much more so than many of the liberal blogs on Huffington. Another site that gets similar Google treatment has no political slant at all, and is not even widely read.
Why should my fellow Huffington writers care about this?
If you read Huffington and only Huffington for all your news and views, then it may not matter. Although, even then, with thousands of blogs published on Huffington each week, you're probably missing out on all those that aren't featured and thus die quiet deaths, like trees falling in a primeval forest.
But if you're like me and probably a million others, and you boot up, first thing in the morning, to a Google News page which you've customized to your special tastes and interests, you're missing out on a lot of interesting Huffington content.
Could this Google omission be the symptom of some unseen Internet rivalry? Is it a question of money? Has Google demanded some exorbitant payment for indexing of Huffington articles which the Huffington Post has been unwilling to pay?
But if Google is merely ignoring the HuffPost because of some bizarre technical oversight, then it's a very big oversight which ought to be corrected.