I got this email (I’ll keep the emailer anonymous unless (s)he notifies me otherwise):
It’s very disturbing how Google is behaving with regard to Climategate/Climaquiddick. I put both of those in my custom news page. For a while, it steadfastly refused to update Climaquiddick, and then it began to update Climategate only with stories attacking climate change skeptics. I could find many more stories on Yahoo, most of which were alarmed at the fraud which seems to be occurring.
Then when I logged in today, Google News had deleted those two categories from my custom section. When I reestablished them, they brought up only a few of the old, outdated original stories plus a few newer attack stories.
Web searches on Climaquiddick yielded only 72,600 hits on Google and 84,300 on Bing, but 565,000 on Yahoo. None of them will autocomplete the word “Climaquiddick.” They won’t autocomplete “Climategate” either, but Yahoo alone will suggest “climate gate.”
Does everyone in Silicon Valley think that pretending information doesn’t exist will make it so? If so, how much can we trust the technology they produce?
I think that there are going to be huge reverberations of untrust throughout many areas of authority resulting from this. As was pointed out early on, it’s not just a scientific scandal, it’s a journalistic one.
What do you expect from a company that helps China keep it’s censorship systems in place? They made their view about freedom of speech well known at that time.
So much for “Don’t be Evil”.
I’m calling shenanigans. Googlers are a bunch of lefties, but the integrity of their index means everything to them. I need more evidence than an anonymous email to believe this.
I’ve noticed Googles’ bad behavior last week in regard to all things climategate. I changed my default search engine to Bing! Much better results.
Yeah, I don’t think those words are mainstream. That being said, the removal from the new customization is interesting. I’ll have to try and duplicate the results.
???
@Brock: You have all the evidence you could want at your fingertips. Simply reproduce the searchs that the email describes and see if you get similar results. 5 min at most.
I’ve heard that Google worships their algorithms, too. But I also remember that during the 2008 campaign, google subsidiary YouTube repeatedly blocked McCain ads for “content violations”, leaving Obama ads up.
If we’ve learned one thing from climaquiddick, it’s that an algorithm can be made to say whatever the writer wants. What we see as valuable content they may decide is “junk” that a good algorithm should filter out.
Brock,
Why don’t you try typing “Climate Gate” into Google? Then try it in Bing. Bing suggests Climate-gate after “Cli”, Google simply pretends the hottest search term of the past month does not exist.
Haven’t tried yahoo. The above behavior by Google was enough to finally get me to switch. Bing seems to work just fine. For a short while, Bing did not auto-suggest Climate-gate, either, but they fixed it.
I’m calling total BS. Google “climategate” and you get plenty of categories (autocomplete does, oddly enough, separate “climate” and “gate” for many of them) and the first page of results for “Climategate Emails” contains a lot of links to posts critical of the CRU (i.e., Pajamas Media, RealClearPolitics and one entry entitled “Climategate Emails Damning”).
Really, it is SO easy to check this kind of accusation that it amazes me that you apparently haven’t.
“I need more evidence than an anonymous email to believe this.”
Well gee, you could go to google, bing, and yahoo and check it out yerownself. It’s not like it’s clima… err rocket science or anything.
7 PM EST on 12 December 2009: Google returns 72,200 hits for – Yahoo! returns 565,000 for same term. gets 42,500,000 hits from Yahoo! and 24,600,000 from Google. For giggles, Bing return 56,800,000 hits and 84,400 for .
OK, Bing removed the search term, I just changed my search engine to Yahoo.
I agree that it’s a journalistic scandal as well as a scientific one, but this Google thing is bizarre. The first hint I get on c-l-i-m-a-t- is climategate. When I search for Climategate news, I get a full page with many on the climate-skeptic side.
link
Google has been unreliable on political subjects for a while. I have attributed it to gaming by the leftist community which works to raise the rank of leftist sites. I have been using Dogpile for anything at all political. Wikipedia is also unreliable on climate but I assume everyone knows that. There is an editor who quickly deletes or alters any climate skeptic post.
Not only does Google not auto suggest Climategate, but they are buying search ads to promote Al Gore. Search Climategate and click on the ad for “Global Warming Explained”. The url is http://www.google.com/cop15
Unbelievable.
K nailed it. Google is not, repeat NOT, a socially responsible company as far as I am concerned.
Show Google someone in power, and they will fall to their knees to fellate him.
I’m calling shenanigans. Googlers are a bunch of lefties, but the integrity of their index means everything to them. I need more evidence than an anonymous email to believe this.
Here is a story that does an analysis on this subject. This was just a few days after the story broke.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/02/google-trends-on-climategate-show-public-interest-increasing-but-troubling-questions-loom/
“I’ll have to try and duplicate the results.”
Dammit, Ben, don’t you realize the science is settled? And anyway, Google deleted its search algorithm years ago, so there. Denialist!
You know something fun? You search “climategate” and it says there are around 26.8 Million results. Which is way more than most of the options in the suggestion box.
Why does “copenhagen treaty” show up as a suggestion even though it has, way, way less results?
When I’m trying to find an old news article, sometimes Yahoo! turns up lots of hits when Google turns up none. I noticed that a year or two ago.
What the heck is being discussed here. I just Googled “climate” and the second option on the list was:
Results 1 – 10 of about 24,800,000 for climategate. (0.19 seconds)
This kind of stuff has been going for as long as I can remember – more than 60 years. From what I gather it’s been going on for thousands of years.
If you really want to know something you’ve got to dig. And carry a hatchet to chop the roots.
Do you think this has anything to do with the fact that Al Gore is a member of that Google board of directors
I use Dogpile, and it had no problems at all with climategate. Auto-complete and everything.
I get different result (from Switzerland);
Ergebnisse 1 – 10 von ungefähr 24’800’000 für climategate. (0.11 Sekunden)
Ergebnisse 1 – 10 von ungefähr 83’000 für Climaquiddick. (0.21 Sekunden)
I guess I don’t understand. I just typed “cli” into Google and the first completed word offered was “climategate” which yielded 24,600,000 results.
Kinda confused here guys. While I generally agree with the coments made about Google I just tried “climagegate” in the IE plugin and it came up with climategate after “cl”. When I went to the search page it listed 14,200,000 hits. Not bad.
Wonder what the differences are between your experiences and mine. Any ideas?
Vote with your mouse, switch to bing.
I just tried it, neither google nor bing suggested climate gate (google suggest climate gates) after I typed climate. on Yahoo, it was the second suggest after I typed clim….I’m switching to Yahoo.
I guess Google tracks your site visits and makes a decision about where they sense you want to go. If you hit the porn sites regularly, their algorithm senses you are not interested in AGW and doesn’t suggest it.
Yeah. Google personalizes search results, so we’ll never all see the exact same thing. It’s a weak AI, not a Dewey-Decimal system.
I was on my phone before, not a computer, but thanks for the polite tone of conversation!
I just repeated Tim Blair’s experiment, and from where I’m sitting in NC I can (mostly) confirm his results. Even after fully typing climategate, Google suggests “climate Guatemala.”
Results 1 – 10 of about 8,300,000 for climate gate. (0.16 seconds
Just tried it now. Google will not autocomplete “climategate” even when it’s completely typed out. It desperately asks “Did you mean CLIMATE GUATEMALA?”
Holy Cow… after years of Google manipulating what news even shows up in Google News, much less their search engine, is a whole new generation just finally realizing that Google is as dedicated to “hiding the decline” as the East Anglia climate gurus are at shaping global warming??? It’s not even partisanship anymore… it’s simple corruption by Google and many leftist news outlets.
It appears you’re talking about how Google News is reluctant to locate stories about Climategate. Just how is this a journalistic scandal? But then, everything with you is some kind of journalistic scandal. How tiresome.
Forgive me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the illustrious Mr Gore on the board of advisors to google?
“• Types: “climategate”
Top suggestion: “climate guatemala” ”
nice AlGorerhythm
Brock …
before you call BS why don’t you do your own “peer review”, run the same searches and disprove the theory …
until then go ahead an trust Google …
leftists covet power more than integrity … always have, always will …
Autocomplete suggestions are not server side, that info is stored user side and based on keywords in your browser history. Climategate is the first thing autosuggested after “cli” on my goole search bar on firefox. I also believe that if your disk cleanup software is cranked up tight, that the autocomplete data will get cleaned out next time it does a full system scan and cleaning.
i call shenanigans. this is my results from google, first page:
PJTV Covers Climategate
http://www.PJTV.com/climategate Full coverage of how scientists cooked data on climate change.
Search ResultsResults include your SearchWiki notes for climategate. Share these notes
Copy and paste this link into an email or IM:
See a preview of the shared page
News results for climategate
Telegraph.co.uk Guest column: ‘Climategate’ should derail Copenhagen climate … – 17 hours ago
But the “climategate” scandal — the release of e-mails and other documents indicating gross misconduct among key scientists — suggests otherwise. …Green Bay Press Gazette – 216 related articles »
‘Climategate’ haunts summit – Independent Online – 746 related articles »Top UN official: Climategate ‘exaggerated’ – Politico – 171 related articles »
Climatic Research Unit e-mail hacking incident – Wikipedia, the …The Climatic Research Unit e-mail hacking incident, referred to by some sources as “Climategate”, began in November 2009 with the hacking of a server used …
en.wikipedia.org/…/Climatic_Research_Unit_e-mail_hacking_incident – Cached -Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of ‘Anthropogenic Global …If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; …
blogs.telegraph.co.uk/…/climategate-the-final-nail-in-the-coffin-of-anthropogenic-global-warming/ – Cached -RealClearPolitics – ClimateGate: The Fix is InNov 24, 2009 … ClimateGate: The Fix is In. By Robert Tracinski. In early October, I covered a breaking story about evidence of corruption in the basic …
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/…/the_fix_is_in_99280.html – Cached –
I submitted a story to Slashdot over a week ago about Google’s persistent failure to auto-complete “climategate”. (They didn’t run it.) To be completely accurate, Google has occasional bursts in which it will autocomplete “climategate”, but it appears to always go back to non-autocomplete, even though it now shows over 216 million hits for “climategate”.
“Climate guatemala” indeed. ..bruce..
and bing is even further from what you describe:
UN Security Stops Journalist’s Questions About…
A Stanford Professor has used United Nation security officers to silence a journalist asking him “inconvenient questions” during a press briefing at the climate change conference in Copenhagen. Professor Stephen Schneider’s assistant…
Alex Jones’ Prison Planet.com·15 hours ago
Skeptics buoyed by Climategate
Former vice-president Al Gore, the most recognized U … has not stopped Republican members of Congress, two dozen of whom sent a letter to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon demanding that he investigate the emails. It all began…
The Chronicle Herald·1 day ago
Gore weighs in on ‘Climategate’ emails
Washington – Nobel-winning environmental crusader Al Gore weighed in on “Climategate” on Wednesday, saying the emails at the centre of the row were being taken out of context. “Well, they took a few phrases out of context. These are private…
Independent Online·12/10/2009
Covering Up Climategate To Comfort Paleolibs
As a person who has a PhD in an applied-science discipline, if I were reviewing a PhD dissertation and it’s content exhibited charactreristics analogous to the CLIMATE-GATE scandal (e.g. discarding of raw data, deceptive/fraudulant software…
North County Times·45 minutes ago
Mike – Not true — the autocomplete is populated based on results sent back from the server. Every time you type in a letter a call is made back to the server to retrieve this info. Google and Bing appear to be purposefully trying to steer folks away from this topic by not giving an accurate autocomplete.
“Autocomplete suggestions are not server side, that info is stored user side and based on keywords in your browser history.”
so tim blair on 12/6/09 is looking for “climate guatemala”
that makes something weird. must be beer somewhere in guatemala
/sarc off
Google is probably invested heavily on GW and they want their money back even they ask Obama to print more money.
I just tried climategate in google. It was not auto suggested at all. In fact, when I got to “climategat” the only two auto suggests were “climate guatemala” and “climate guatemala city.”
I tried it as two separate words, and even after typing the whole thing out (“climate gate”) I was being suggested “climate gates.”
Climategate is not suggested at all.
(oddly, googlegate is autosuggested)
A great article covering “Googlegate” is here:
“As of six days after this post (today is Tuesday December 8), Google Suggest no longer offers any choices for C-l-i-m-a-t-e-g-a-t-e, no matter how many letters one types. The total number of links appears to be stable around 30 million. The first reader who finds any Google search with 30 million or more links that Google Suggest doesn’t assist with wins the prize.”
http://talkingabouttheweather.wordpress.com/2009/12/02/google-gate/
I just tried Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Google actually had first page results mostly from the skeptical of AGW side with a PJTV paid link. Other than the climate skeptic #2 climate-gate.org and #3 wattsupwiththat.com search results, Bing had more pro-AGW results. Looking at Yahoo’s first page of results, I wouldn’t understand the scandal at all. Totally worthless factcheck.org page that doesn’t understand that the leaked computer code, independent of the email, appears to show an attempt to make AGW look bigger and natural climate cycles look smaller. The wikipedia result at least presented enough facts with the spin so someone could learn more.
No not really, those are the terms I would use if I was looking for what the climate in guatemala was like, perhaps for planning for a trip…