A number of large US publishers are lobbying Google for higher search rankings than they see at present, according to AdAge.
The website reports that these publishers are calling on Google to recognise that they create original content which is often used by bloggers to form the basis of their own posts - with these blogs tending to see higher rankings than the original sources, they claim.
Concerns have been raised by members of Google's invitation-only Publishers Advisory Council over whether Google's algorithm are suitable for their sites, as some believe that the algorithm in fact penalises paid-for content.
Members of the council include the likes of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
"This would in no way mean that only professional content publishers would get an advantage. It really just says that the original source and the source with real access should somehow be recognised as the most important," one publisher told AdAge.
However, writing on the Guardian's PDA blog, Jemima Kiss pointed out Google's standard search engine is not a news-specific service - which is what Google News is - and said that there is "no reason" for the first few results in standard web search to be the most recent.
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