Saturday, January 16, 2010

Climategate, Googlegate and censoring

There has been a lot of talk in recent months about the so called "Googlegate". We all knew Google was censoring the data is sent into China on behalf of their the Chinese government, but many people had no idea about what Google was doing to the search results here.

Some people believe Google is censoring the search results, some people think that is pure tinfoil hat stuff, after all Google has a motto of "Do no evil". I think they are censoring results. When I first looked earlier today, 1,750,000 records were returned. An hour later, 1,660,000 records returned.

I will let you decide for yourself. Compare and contrast the search results for "climategate" for Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

Who is censoring who?

UPDATE: This morning Google search returned 1,640,000 records.

4 comments:

The_Iceman said...

YAHOO!!!

Mike Brock said...

I'd say it's pretty clearly in the tinfoil hat category: http://westernstandard.blogs.com/shotgun/2010/01/googlegate-conspiracy-debunked-thanks-to-me.html

AnonymousCoward said...

Thanks Mike, but what about censoring?

AnonymousCoward said...

Oops hit publish too soon.

I wasn't talking about the Google suggest feature. That can easily be influenced by people trying the searches. It uses both local data (your past searches) and data from usage patterns.

What about the fact that Google, the biggest and best search engine out there is only returning a fraction of the hits that Bing and Yahoo do?

As of this AM, Google is returning 1,570,000 hits for Googlegate?

Why is that?