From slashdot:

“Cnet News.com is reporting that Google is no longer talking to Cnet reporters.

In an article about the search company looking for new executive chefs,

the article states: ‘Google representatives have instituted a policy of

not talking with CNET News.com reporters until July 2006 in response to

privacy issues raised by a previous story.’ Apparently, Google was

angered by an article published earlier by Cnet

where all sorts of personal information about Google CEO Eric Schmidt

was included. The information was obtained from Google searches.“

From Techdirt:

“Someone at Slashdot actually read all the way to the bottom of an article about Google’s need for a new chef

(this is news?) where the reporter notes: ‘Google representatives have

instituted a policy of not talking with CNET News.com reporters until

July 2006 in response to privacy issues raised by a previous story.’

That previous story was one discussing how people could find out all sorts of private info about others

by doing Google searches. That’s a story that’s been done plenty of

times before, but this time the reporter used Google to track down some

info (nothing too shocking, honestly) about Google’s own CEO, Eric

Schmidt. It’s not clear if the complaint from Google is about finding

the info on Schmidt, the general point of the article or (perhaps!)

because the reporter got some of the fairly important details wrong

(there’s a correction saying the original article implied that Google’s

desktop search was sending data about what’s on your desktop back to

Google — which is completely false). Even if they’re legitimately

pissed at shoddy coverage of their company, it still comes off as a bit

arrogant to refuse to talk to anyone at News.com for a year.“

Google represents all that is right and good in the technology

space–hiring geniuses to make cool stuff that anyone can use–AKA the

opposite of Microsoft. Conversely, News.com is a sister site, part of

the CNET family and the source of all our muchly popular news articles.

Personally, for those of us at TR, this is really awkward. It’s like

our favorite rockstar just got into a shouting match with our

benevolent uncle. So, we did the only rational thing you can do in this situation, the exact response that every sitcom since Three’s Company has taught us to do when fame fights family…

We started making bets on how long before this whole thing blows over.

The current pool runs between 30 and 90 days. I haven’t staked a

position yet, but I’m leaning towards the long end. Google can be

stubborn.