On Friday, we were pleased to get a nice big profile of one of our local clients in the Vancouver Sun. As these things sometimes do, the article also resulted in a radio interview on CKNW.
Unfortunately, when I do a Google News search for the company’s CEO (a fairly unique string from the article), I come up empty. Why hasn’t Google News indexed this article?
The Sun has a seven days-free then subscriber-only rule for most articles, but this one will apparently be available forever (or so an insider tells me). I know for a fact that Google News spiders the subscription-only stories–why haven’t they spidered this one? Is Canada.com’s site not enabling the Google spider to find all the stories?
DarrenBarefoot.com 
I’ve noticed before that you can’t even turn up Sun and Canada.com articles through a search of those media outlets’ own sites. Try looking up Strigel on the page you provided. Nada. I’ve been thinking for a while that they block certain pages and articles from the search engine. I think this is so they can sell archives or something.
Same thing happens for me with the Globe and Mail. Mentions in the Globe never seem to turn up in my Google News.
It’s not as simple as ‘seven days and then subscriber’ – even subscribers don’t get online access after seven days. It will be available forever from Infomart, which is the paid archive service.
That said, as far as I know it’s not a deliberate attempt to prevent Google from indexing those articles.
The internal site search is awful. Again, that’s not some nefarious plan, it’s just plain bad. I believe there is a plan in place to fix that, however I won’t be holding my breath.