My thoughts are with the folks who lost children in the lastest US tragedy.

[shayman]

I appreciate you digging up the links but those hardly count as proof that Google has a political agenda.

I'd see them as proof that Google's PageRank algorithm - which Google is constantly tweaking to fight off spammers and search-engine-optimization cheaters who want their stuff to appear first - is complicated, constantly evolving, and sometimes will deliberately not index low-quality sources or exclude non-news-sites from the 'news' index. People actually do set up networks of blogs that contribute nothing new other than all mutually linking to each other, all to pollute Google's indexes which (among other things) rate web sites by how many sites link to them. If you can get your site to rank unusually high in a Google search, you'll make more money off of ads. It's tough to build a quality index and fight off people gaming the system at the same time.