Posted 7/15/2004 07:15:00 PM by Douglas

Next to Pop-up ads and broken pr0n links, one of the things on the web that really gets my dander up is newspapers that require registration. Who the hell do these punks think they are? Do they think I'm going to register with them, or spend 7.2 seconds googling the story elsewhere. Apparently, I'm not alone, and it looks like Google itself is going to bury these troglodytes like The New York Times.

But recently, when I googled the terms "Iraq torture prison Abu Ghraib" -- certainly one of the most intensively covered news stories of the year -- the first New York Times article was the 295th search result, trailing the New Yorker, Guardian, ABC and CBS News, New York Post, MSNBC, Slate, CNN, Sydney Morning Herald, Denver Post, USA Today, Bill O'Reilly on FoxNews and a host of others news sites.

What's more, tons of other non-traditional news sources came ahead of the Times, including a number of blogs and low-budget rabble-rousers like Antiwar.com, CounterPunch, truthout and Beliefnet (a site dedicated to spirituality). So did Al-Jazeera (twice). But the Times still ranked low, even after it plastered an Abu Ghraib story on its front page for 32 straight days between May and June. And Google isn't the only one to shun the Times: I got similar results from other search engines (AltaVista, Lycos, Yahoo).

You're not selling papers on the corner anymore, ya morons. If you want me to read the story on your site and see your banner ads, you're going to have to let me do it without my name & email.

I'll admit, I've registered for a few of these moron-athons, but now when I see the dreaded "Registration Required" banner, I hit the Google button quicker than a cocaine addicted rat in a graduate school psyc experiment.