Hiding The Decline At Google?
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 When I reestablished them, they brought up only a few of the old, outdated original stories plus a few newer attack stories.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.
December 12th, 2009 at 2:16 pm
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.
December 12th, 2009 at 2:50 pm
So much for “Don’t be Evil”.
December 12th, 2009 at 3:46 pm
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.
December 12th, 2009 at 3:51 pm
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.
December 12th, 2009 at 3:55 pm
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.
December 12th, 2009 at 3:57 pm
???
@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.
December 12th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
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.
December 12th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
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.
December 12th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
“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.
December 12th, 2009 at 4:05 pm
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 .
December 12th, 2009 at 4:06 pm
OK, Bing removed the search term, I just changed my search engine to Yahoo.
December 12th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
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.
December 12th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
link
December 12th, 2009 at 4:10 pm
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.
December 12th, 2009 at 4:13 pm
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.
December 12th, 2009 at 4:22 pm
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.
December 12th, 2009 at 4:27 pm
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/
December 12th, 2009 at 4:31 pm
“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!
December 12th, 2009 at 4:40 pm
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?
December 12th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
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.
December 12th, 2009 at 4:52 pm
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)
December 12th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
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.
December 12th, 2009 at 4:58 pm
Do you think this has anything to do with the fact that Al Gore is a member of that Google board of directors
December 12th, 2009 at 5:09 pm
I use Dogpile, and it had no problems at all with climategate. Auto-complete and everything.
December 12th, 2009 at 5:12 pm
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)
December 12th, 2009 at 5:12 pm
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.
December 12th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
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?
December 12th, 2009 at 5:37 pm
Vote with your mouse, switch to bing.
December 12th, 2009 at 5:43 pm
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.
December 12th, 2009 at 5:43 pm
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.
December 12th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
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!
December 12th, 2009 at 5:49 pm
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.”
December 12th, 2009 at 5:52 pm
Results 1 – 10 of about 8,300,000 for climate gate. (0.16 seconds
December 12th, 2009 at 5:54 pm
Just tried it now. Google will not autocomplete “climategate” even when it’s completely typed out. It desperately asks “Did you mean CLIMATE GUATEMALA?”
December 12th, 2009 at 6:01 pm
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.
December 12th, 2009 at 6:04 pm
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.
December 12th, 2009 at 6:18 pm
Forgive me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the illustrious Mr Gore on the board of advisors to google?
December 12th, 2009 at 6:31 pm
“• Types: “climategate”
Top suggestion: “climate guatemala” ”
nice AlGorerhythm
December 12th, 2009 at 6:43 pm
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 …
December 12th, 2009 at 7:40 pm
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.
December 12th, 2009 at 7:50 pm
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 -
December 12th, 2009 at 7:54 pm
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..
December 12th, 2009 at 7:54 pm
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
December 12th, 2009 at 8:00 pm
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.
December 12th, 2009 at 8:07 pm
“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
December 12th, 2009 at 8:07 pm
Google is probably invested heavily on GW and they want their money back even they ask Obama to print more money.
December 12th, 2009 at 8:25 pm
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/
December 12th, 2009 at 8:34 pm
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.
December 12th, 2009 at 8:39 pm
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…
December 12th, 2009 at 8:46 pm
[...] So much for “don’t be evil.” Google’s behavior has been utterly despicable. Apparently the new company motto is “Hide the decline.” Are we supposed to believe [...]
December 12th, 2009 at 8:47 pm
I tried both Google and Yahoo. Google did not suggest climategate or permutations until I finished typing it. I received about 24 mil hits. Yahoo did complete climategate and I received about 46 mil hits.
Seems to me that there is something to it but what do you expect from Google? I have seen similar findings on other issues.
December 12th, 2009 at 8:48 pm
[...] View original here: Hiding The Decline At Google? – Transterrestrial Musings [...]
December 12th, 2009 at 8:52 pm
I just typed in “climategate” and got 216,000,000 results. I typed it into the GOOGLE searchfield on the top right of my Firefox 3.0.15 installation on a Ubuntu 9.04 computer. The first page had 11 suggested articles, and without reviewing every single one of them most of the links were to conservative organizations like PJTV, RealClearPolitics, and BIgGovernment. There was also a link, legitimate in my opinion, to Huffington Post. I see absolutely nothing to suggest that Google is trying to hide anything.
December 12th, 2009 at 8:54 pm
Gave me Climate Guatemala.
December 12th, 2009 at 9:02 pm
Just googled “climate gate” -7,330,000 results.
December 12th, 2009 at 9:05 pm
Some of the algorithms would seem to be “live”, in that they are intended to continuously (or at least periodically and frequently) mine the search terms that are actually in use.
If you go back to some of the earliest reporting, you can see the earliest protests were from people who had already seen “climategate” suggested… but who now didn’t see it suggestion. Prompting “Wait, was it stripped manually?”
The search is frequent enough that it keeps making it onto ‘the list’. And it (presumably) keeps getting bumped. No one quite being willing to change code on the running servers to block it permanently is my bet.
December 12th, 2009 at 9:41 pm
I got similar results to those of newrouter, but if I separate the “climate” from the “gate” I get a list of about ten suggestions all related to the controversy. I know the people at Google are a bunch of leftards, but I’m inclined to give them a break here.
December 12th, 2009 at 10:07 pm
Does everyone understand how autosuggest works? I’m not sure people do.
As danoso explained, autosuggest is NOT just your browser’s “auto-complete” feature that fills in your name and address into web forms. It’s a Google (and other search engines too) feature that gives you a list of the MOST POPULAR search terms beginning with whatever you’ve typed up to that point, recomputed every time you press another key.
It’s for this reason that Google Suggest is a useful tool for finding out what’s big in the news lately, or at least what doesn’t present a conflict of interest for Google’s board of directors (apparently). For instance, type “i’m” and the first suggested result is “i’m on a boat”. Which makes sense for a viral meme that everyone’s been searching for. If you look at the list of returned suggestions, they’re clearly sorted in decreasing order of how frequently people would have searched for them. Type something like “shock the” and you’ll see what I mean.
However, the algorithm has the capacity to have certain search terms– including popular ones– filtered out of it. For example, “2 girls” will not return “2 girls 1 cup”, no matter how hard you try. (Fortunately.)
If Google Suggest is returning “climate guatemala”, it means people have used those search terms at some point in the past, frequently enough to exceed some threshold of popularity and show up in the list. It doesn’t mean Google is pulling random words out of its dictionary to try to complete your search.
Knowing this, it seems clear that the only reason “climategate” isn’t showing up is that it’s been consciously filtered out. It’s definitely not that it’s not a popular search term.
Also– I’ve been keeping track of this ever since this started to be an interesting phenomenon a couple of weeks ago. First “climategate” had disappeared from the suggestion list, but “climate-gate” did show up in the first few entries returned by “climate”. A couple of days later, after steadily moving up the list, “climate-gate” had suddenly disappeared too. And a few days after that, I saw “climate gate” was in the results, but it too quickly vanished. Finally, just a couple of days ago, I saw “climategate emails” and “climategate scandal” popping up at the top of the suggestions. But now those too are gone; only “climate guatemala” is left.
Not only is this a real phenomenon, it’s keeping someone at Google awfully busy.
December 12th, 2009 at 10:11 pm
I use firefox. Got “climate guatemala” when I typed in “climategate” in the google search box. When I typed in “climate gat”, I finally got “climate gates” as second choice. “climate gatlinburg” was the first choice.
December 12th, 2009 at 10:50 pm
I have seen this phenomenon off and on for the last couple weeks. I wish I had kept better track – it appears to be an intermittent phenomenon on both Bing and Google. Just now (~10:30 Pacific) I got a list of very pertinent results from Google [climategate, climategate emails, climategate scandal, climategate cnn, climategate fox news], but nothing from Bing. When I first read this post this morning, I didn’t get anything from either search engine. Yahoo shows climate gate. Yet if I put in something innocuous – like, SpaceShipTwo – I get a list of pertinent posts. I have never seen anything like this – it has been on and off the auto-suggest for weeks.
December 12th, 2009 at 11:00 pm
I suspect that part of what’s happening is a junk filter on Google’s search engine, that properly used improves search results. But if enough loony lefties (some of whom may be Google employees) are submitting critical pages as junk, this filter could be subverted into censorship. An ebb and flow of politically charged search results could result from these false junk reports collecting and being cleaned out.
But I wouldn’t dismiss the AlGore connection in how input to this filter is managed.
Same problem wikipedia has on any topic where people have an axe to grind, where community review that otherwise results in better quality can backfire.
December 12th, 2009 at 11:17 pm
Puzzling. No judgements, but I just did a Google search of “climategate” and got 12,800,000 hits. The first page are all sites like Fox, realclearpolitics, huffingtonpost, wikipedia, London Telegraph, cbsnews and six of the seven ads were “Pro-Hoax”. Quite contrary to what I expected after reading this post and comments.
December 13th, 2009 at 12:16 am
I tried the experiment, and as soon as I’d typed “clim” into Google, “climategate” was provided as an option. It produced 25,200,000 results. It seems strange that different people are reporting wildly differing results.
December 13th, 2009 at 12:20 am
I’m still getting climategate when I type “clima”. Have been all evening long. If you guys are getting something different at the same time, then I would suggest that there may be regional differences. I’m in Los Angeles. I’ve been hearing about this autocomplete thing for over a week now but every time I test it myself in the browser search using google it always autocompletes as ‘climategate’, and this is on computers here where I live and on campus, so its not just one machine that has no trouble with getting the proper return, I’ve got a sample of about 20 different machines. After testing so many and seeing none malfunction, I personally was beginning to think that those claiming the bug were agents provocateurs intent on making the skeptic movement look tin hatty. But I think there is a more rational explanation, that there are some regional google servers where this bug is happening.
December 13th, 2009 at 2:02 am
[...] Rand Simberg on ‘hiding the decline’ [...]
December 13th, 2009 at 3:12 am
There is a thread for this at google forums, maybe it needs some comments to get there attention?
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Web+Search/thread?tid=7bfc9638a8fcba94&hl=en
December 13th, 2009 at 4:40 am
What seems to be happening is that the algorithm is dynamic, making suggestions based on an evolving assessment of the level of interest in a topic. So when I went on yesterday, Google suggested “climategate” after I got to the “g” (which makes a certain amount of sense). This morning, it suggested it earlier. I’m not sure that the search results are being modified, but given Google’s past behavior, I wouldn’t doubt that they’re fudging their news sections based on their ideological leanings. Of course, that’s no different than what any other newspaper does, by acting as a gatekeeper. The whole point of Google News was to avoid that, but as we see: that gatekeeping power couldn’t be left unused forever. Google certainly is (and to some extent always has been) used as a political tool by the left.
December 13th, 2009 at 5:38 am
Huh, I get “climategate” as the second choice for “climate” now, but not for “climat” even though all the phrases suggested start with “climate”.
December 13th, 2009 at 5:49 am
You’re all so civil. I’d expect every moral person to boycott wiki and google and, and, and, until the market provides an objective solution. Let them know why. Otherwise, it’s simply funding the algorithm for one’s demise.
Let’s be clear. Climategate by whatever name has already exposed the largest THEFT in history. Sunk cost. However, we still have a worldwide cabal of co-conspiring politicians, bureaucrats, gov’t agencies, NGOs, VCs, publishers, grantmakers, CEOs of sham “green” cos (alternative energy like bio, solar, wind), scientists and agitators all working in concert to continue defrauding the public, in order to eliminate indivdual rights through increased taxation.
Tens of thousands knowingly conspiring; ie, none can now claim ignorance. This is the same cadre of criminals that works to preclude US from exploiting national resources and building nuclear power plants. They’re stealing the future.
Anyone supporting AGW is complicit. That includes any editor at a search engine or a scientific journal who alters the results to fit their view. These folks are not merely being socialists/Marxists/communists/fascists/statists, they’re flatout guilty of sedition.
AGW is not a political issue anymore than national healthcare is; both are solely about the theft of your money and your freedom. The person willing to cheat, be it about the science or the search results, is demonstrating the morality of a kapo. Call’em out.
Climatology is not science; it’s a study.
UN – withdraw, defund, evict.
EPA, NASA, NOIA et al delenda est
December 13th, 2009 at 6:02 am
I apologize for not including lawyers in my list of co-conspirators.
December 13th, 2009 at 6:37 am
Notice how wattsupwiththat.com and climateaudit.com are not in the top picks on your web search.
December 13th, 2009 at 6:38 am
I get “climate gate” when I type out “climate gat” so it autocompletes the e at the end for me. And I get “climate guatemala” even when I’ve typed out “climategate”
December 13th, 2009 at 6:45 am
Weird, now, I get climategate with “climateg” though it is now the first choice.
December 13th, 2009 at 8:10 am
[...] Well, Al Gore Is A Board Member December 13, 2009 Posted by taoist in Global Warming. Tags: Climaquiddick, Climategate, Google, The Internet trackback Google seems to be doing it’s own “hide the decline”. [...]
December 13th, 2009 at 9:42 am
Can you say, ‘JUNK JOURNALISM’ ?
December 13th, 2009 at 9:55 am
Just tried at google: at “climate” climategate was the second auto-complete suggestion, but at “climateg” it wasn’t in the top 10. it didn’t show up again until “climategat”, when it was top. the rest were all climategate related, mostly spelled “climate gate”.
It looks like maybe based off actual search strings typed by users. Maybe most people who hear about climategate break it into two words?
December 13th, 2009 at 10:39 am
I now get it with “clim”. As far as I know, I haven’t made any searches on this word. Weird how this keeps changing.
December 13th, 2009 at 11:39 am
Now, it’s “clima”. This seems to change quite regularly. I wonder if other lookup terms change so much?
December 13th, 2009 at 1:29 pm
Odd. Now I get ‘climategate’ when I type ‘climateg’, but as soon as I get to ‘climatega’ or ‘climategat’, it’s back to ‘climate guatemala’!
December 13th, 2009 at 1:53 pm
Stephen, that is weird. “clim” gets me climategate, but more letters do not.
December 13th, 2009 at 2:49 pm
remember google can give different results based on your web history now, even if your not logged in.
December 13th, 2009 at 9:31 pm
[...] conclusion that there’s really nothing wrong with the “science”. Also interesting, considering the recent criticism of Google, is the banner advert that appears in the middle of the story: Ads by Google. What is Global [...]
December 13th, 2009 at 10:01 pm
remember google can give different results based on your web history now, even if your not logged in.
But how can it change so much hour by hour? I don’t do that much in between my lookup attempts?
December 14th, 2009 at 5:12 am
I just tried it. after typing in “cli,” climate change is the top result, with climate gate being the second. i don’t understand the outrage.
December 14th, 2009 at 7:43 am
I get climategate as #2 result at “clim”.
December 14th, 2009 at 7:44 am
All I know Jeremy is that there have been times when “climategate” has disappeared completely.
December 14th, 2009 at 8:07 am
It might be possible to reverse engineer the google autocomplete algorithm from comments above. It seems obvious they have a dynamic blacklist which can be overuled by enough people searching for a term, which in turn can be reversed. It’s a unending voting system rather than an absolute blacklist. It would also seem that C-L-I and others like C-L-I-M are separate hits in the index (from the comments above.)
December 14th, 2009 at 8:57 am
But how can it change so much hour by hour?
Karl, one of my friends who works at google says that when he wants to test an improvement, he can divert x% of the incoming requests to use his modified algorithm. Needless to say, there are safeguards so that he doesn’t hose the site. There are more opportunities for such experimental diversions on secondary functions such as AdWords and autocomplete than there are for the main search algorithm (which my friend does not even have access to). Because people are constantly trying to game the system with respect to AdWords (I’m not sure about autocomplete), there are frequent modifications to the algorithm, and again, only x% of the users see the impact of such modifications at first.
December 15th, 2009 at 7:06 pm
Bob-1, so why should it change so much then? Are these algorithms just random noise?
December 15th, 2009 at 8:08 pm
I’m not following you. No, of course they are not random noise. Certainly there are many ways of computing suggested search terms. My only point was that a user can make two requests a few seconds apart, and the first request might be processed using one algorithm, and the second request might be processed using a different algorithm. I’m not saying that this will happen, just that it could happen.
December 16th, 2009 at 7:53 am
Bob-1, the point is that all of these algorithms supposedly have the same final goal, delivering search terms that are frequently used and desired by the user. Hence, they should all have similar outcomes. An algorithm that delivers “climate guatemala” as a best fit to “climategate”, which I have gotten at times, is not such a one.
December 16th, 2009 at 10:18 am
“all of these algorithms supposedly have the same final goal, delivering search terms that are frequently used and desired by the user.”
Karl, stop and think about all the different ways “terms that are frequently used and desired by the user” can be determined.
The following is just off the top of my head – I’d write a better comment if I had more time, but I hope this gives you a sense of what a truly good answer would look like.
One way: predict what the person is going to type based on all the other identical strings typed by other users
Another way: predict what the person is going to type based on all the other identical strings typed by that user in the past.
3rd way: same as one of the above, but factor in what other people actually clicked on, based on the words in the preview google provided in its search results.
4th way: same as one of the first two, but factor in what the user in question actually clicked on, based on the words in preview google provided in its search results.
5th and 6th ways: same as 3rd and 4th ways, but factor in all the words in the body of webpages which have been selected, rather than just the words in the preview.
7th way: start using statistical liklihoods that aren’t based on previous behavior by any user, but rather, likelihoods based on the frequency of word combinations found in english text.
8th to Nth way: In addition to the above methods, use semantic networks which represent how words are related. In other words, start to actually parse what’s going on. There are an enormous number of ways to do this.
I’m not suggesting that some of the methods listed above are particularly smart — they aren’t! I just wanted to list a few brain dead ways of doing it so that you’d see there are alternatives. Furthermore, some of the smartest ways of doing it might be a bit brittle when it comes to neologisms, which is not always unreasonable, if the methods are superior for standard English, as well as for terms such as “watergate” which have had time to work their way into the lexicon. If people are still talking about “climategate” in a few years, and you still have the same objections, I think you’d have a stronger case.
December 16th, 2009 at 10:35 am
Note that some of the simplistic methods I was talking about above depend on multiple-word inputs. To see what I mean, see what google autocomplete suggests when you type “hacked email cl”….
December 17th, 2009 at 12:04 pm
How ’bout this for a new Google motto: “Don’t be Weevil!”
Based on the following entry from Wikipedia, the analogy is compelling: the toxic results of small (minded) pinheads who manipulate search results in other people’s information storehouses under the cover of darkness should be brought out into the open and eradicated.
===============================================
A weevil is any beetle from the Curculionoidea superfamily. They are usually small, less than 6 mm (¼ inch), and herbivorous. There are over 60,000 species in several families, mostly in the family Curculionidae (the true weevils). Some other beetles, although not closely related, bear the name “weevil”, such as the biscuit weevil (Stegobium paniceum), which belongs to the family Anobiidae.
Many weevils are damaging to crops. The grain or wheat weevil (Sitophilus granarius) damages stored grain. The boll weevil (Anthonomus grandis) attacks cotton crops. It lays its eggs inside cotton bolls, and the young weevils eat their way out.
Weevils are often found in dry foods including nuts and seeds, cereal and grain products, such as pancake mix. In the domestic setting, they are most likely to be observed when a bag of flour is opened. Their presence is often indicated by the granules of the infested item sticking together in strings, as if caught in a cobweb. If ingested, E. coli infection[citation needed] and other various diseases[clarification needed] can be contracted from weevils, depending on their diet.
December 20th, 2009 at 8:45 am
http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/Missing_White_Womyn_Syndrome
this isn’t isolated guys.
Start looking into the term pr0 (Page Rank Zero) on other search engines.
Here’s a quick definition
http://www.pr0.net/
As you read from ED, Google staff are actively using the PR0 as a method of shielding pet causes and people.
December 20th, 2009 at 8:53 am
Oh here, more digging through yahoo.
http://www.free-internet-media.com/
January 29th, 2010 at 1:36 am
When the use of environmentalism as a tool for the creation of global government was first imagined, there was no internet. Free access to up-to-the-minute information, not filtered through the MSM, was not anticipated. When Hussein was elected, I feared even this boon to free information was insufficient. Then I learned the voting margins in most states were less than the automatic electoral bias resulting from the MSM’s mendacity. Now we see information on the AGW fraud spread like wild fire.