One reader insists that something odd is up with Google. Keyword searches, she says, aren't giving the same results as before.Buzzflash offered a link demonstrating that a Google search of Cindy Sheehan resulted in tons of stories by right-wingers pushing the she's-a-demon line.
Can Google be hacked? The idea seems paranoid, even by my standards. The rightist sites may simply be getting more hits. Still, I'd like to hear what others have to say...
17 comments:
Yes, it's true. google is being tinkered with to pull up rightwingers' choice of web pages. A case in point: when i google my name, I was shocked to find that my name and home address and all entire list of names and addresses of a "friends of Barbara Boxer" list from a $50 donation I had made to attend an event for barbara boxer. Yes the info is public but if you pull up "friends of George Bush" you don't pull up the entire list of contributors and their address/employer of record.
i complained to Google weeks ago, forwarded an email to a citizen liason at Boxer's office and still nothing has changed. The rightwingers have a lock on being able to make sure Google searches pull up/list their desired webpages.
FYI
maybe the majority of americans realize what sort of tool of the self-loathing left Sheehan has become...
Your comment "self loathing left" indicates you despise Cindy Sheehan's efforts and people like her. you have learned nothing about how the current so-called elected officials have stolen yet again the last 2004 election via Ohio, Florida. You have learned nothing about how BushCo ALLOWED and it appears ABETTED the al quaida 9/11 attacks in order to prop up Bush's sagging poll ratings, push through the Patriot Act, hold "enemy combatants" for indefinite periods of time without access to counsel, push through the war in Iraq, and dismantle EPA regulations. It is tragic, disgusting what is going on in this country and it is just a matter of time before this country gets pushed into martial law, the draft restored, homosexuals find themselves criminals, etc. etc. We are a few steps away from another 3rd reich in which the desireables get imprisoned into labor camps (for example anyone who voted for Kerry).
All in the name of national security, special rights and tax breaks/welfare for corporations. Abraham Lincoln would be ashamed at what has happened to the Republican party and the lack of leadership.
I for one will PRAY that the extreme right BushCo folks do not succeed in their future attempts to ditch the constitution and nuke Iran in response to a deliberately planted 9/11 small nuke on US soil.
what are you doing to stop your friends from turning the US into a mediocre version of CHile?
try googling "Downing street memo" and see what you get!
The last time I tried, the Downing street website was nowhere in sight.
More disturbing is that the www.prouty.org's "forums" discussion thread website has been down for nearly 3 weeks. This is the longest their discussion thread "forums" has ever been down. Their "forums" discussion has been hacked several times this year. This "forums" discussion thread has served to provide a virtual respository for new research on JFK assasination and other related topics.
Downing Street Memo's website, http://www.downingstreetmemo.com/ is backup and running.
when I did a google search, it was number three:
"The secret Downing Street memo - Sunday Times - Times OnlineMay 01, 2005 The secret Downing Street memo. SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL - UK EYES ONLY. DAVID MANNING From: Matthew Rycroft Date: 23 July 2002 S 195 /02 ...
www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1593607,00.html - Similar pages
Ministers were told of need for Gulf war ‘excuse’ - Sunday Times ...The Downing Street memo burst into the mainstream American media only last week after it was raised at a joint Bush-Blair press conference, ...
www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1650822,00.html - Similar pages
The Downing Street Memo :: What is it?The Downing Street Memo, recently leaked, reveals that President George W. Bush decided to overthrow Saddam Hussein in the summer 2002 and—determined to ...
www.downingstreetmemo.com/ - 22k - Aug 16, 2005 - Cached - Similar pages
Downing Street memo - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaThe term "Downing street memo" is also used to generally describe a larger body ... Previous to the appearance of the Downing Street Memo, six other British ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downing_Street_memo - 87k - Aug 17, 2005 - Cached - Similar pages
The secret Downing Street memo... 2005 Cabinet Office paper: Conditions for military action The secret Downing Street memo SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL - UK EYES ONLY DAVID MANNING ...
www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8709.htm - 16k - Cached - Similar pages
Democracy For AmericaDowning Street Memo. As originally reported in the The Times of London, May 1, 2005 ... Sign the Downing Street Memo Petition John Scarlett summarised the ...
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Democracy For AmericaRead the Downing Street Memo then... Sign the Petition to Demand that Congress hold full hearings · ABOUT DFA • CONTACT US • ORGANIZE • BLOG FOR AMERICA ...
www.democracyforamerica.com/memo_movie - 6k - Aug 16, 2005 - Cached - Similar pages
[ More results from www.democracyforamerica.com ]
AfterDowningStreet.org | For a Resolution of InquiryKey Documents. Downing Street Documents · Bonifaz to Conyers · Bush to Congress · Talking Points · Sunday Times Summary · Basic Summary ...
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Why has 'Downing Street memo' story been a 'dud' in US ...Why has 'Downing Street memo' story been a 'dud' in US?
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See what happens if you try Googling for information and topics that don't have so much to do with government, the "left" or the "right." See what happens if you do keyword searches for your favorite articles and websites of interest from Days of Yore. Do they come up? What about when you repeat the search using the "include ommitted results" function? I'm just curious to see if I'm the only person who can no longer find information she once took for granted could always be located online.
Regarding your fanciful label of "the self-loathing left", that's actually the *Fascist-loathing* Left, MPH, not that little things like accuracy or truthfulnesss in their scribblings typically concern rabid NeoConNazi dupes like yourself.
Google results can indeed be manipulated. Google itself publishes the criteria which govern its rankings, along with safeguards to prevent [but not altogether eliminate] such manipulation), and threats of exclusion for any website which exploits these formulas.
However, a simple search of "Cindy Sheehan" yielded a page of listings which were divided between apparently supportive sites, and places like CNN. None appeared to be right-wing.
Can google be hacked? Doubtful. If there are odd results, there are two possibilities.
a) A Google bomb approach has been taken. See the wikipedia page on the subject.
b) Google, as a company or at the level of a malicious programmer, is tweaking their results.
Likely, though, neither has happened. Google results manipulation is a cottage industry. But most of the things one can try to improve their ranking can also destroy their ranking. Even changes as slight as modifying the non-visible code in an HTML page can hurt your ranking, or catapult you to the top.
Other things that have a lot of affect are your URL conventions, your use of proper tags like h1, h2, h3, the parsability of your HTML by a bot, and, of course, how many sites of a similar nature are pointing to you.
I didn't dig into the downingstreet code, but barring malicious activity, which seems unlikely, perhaps they made a change that, at least temporarily, harmed their ranking.
http://progprog.blogspot.com
Well, it may have been fixed???
This morn I googled Cindy Sheehan and got the following Cindy stories:
MeetWendy.org
gsfp.org
buzzflash
cnn
washingto post
truthout,org
wikpedia
daily kos
michellemalkin.com
All were either favorable or neutral except the last, which quotes Bill Reilly and is generally devoted to smearing Sheehan's associates.
I haven't seen the Right Wing Effect yet, but I'll be watching for it.
Didn't Google hire that hack that was the spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authoirty in Iraq? That guy that had about 3 strands of hair on the front of his head and those smarty-pants glasses?
Once again, I encourage those who feel "safe" that Google is functioning as always to search for pages dealing with, let's say, ostensibly non-politicized social subjects. Yeah, yeah, I know, the right has politicized *everything.* Preferably something you've searched for via Google in the past, and know *should* still come up on your first few pages of hits. I've been alarmed at the number of things I can't get a lot of hits to come up on (certain discussions of modern discoveries in anthropology--stuff I don't really think of as related to the current "evolution wars"--certain articles I used to be able to locate about electricity, cats and infertility in women [not something I've seen neo-cons work to suppress--they want the wimmen to be as pregnant as possible!]).
Are you talking about google news- or just plain google?
I didn't see anything wrong with google, but I have noticed a rather prejudicial slant in google news....
they do it with many other issues, as well.
Don't think you need to hack for that-but I don't know how they administer that.
For more info on google- go here:
http://www.google-watch.org/
here's a search engine alternative:
http://www.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/scraper.htm
Google may indeed be going "conservative"
"So we had a report last month that Google had hired Dan Senor as vice president of global communications and strategy, replacing the spot vacated by Cindy McCaffrey earlier this year. Senor recently served as advisor to the US presidential envoy in Iraq. Too Early to Google from the Washington Post today says it ain't so. Now Google says it was to early for them to have confirmed that. Senor, meanwhile, apparantly may do contract work for Google providing "strategic advice."
source
"A former Senior Associate at the Carlyle Group, Senor was briefly Scott McLellan's deputy as White House spokesman before becoming head of the the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq's information department.
...An impressive resume, for sure, but one perhaps more useful to a company building a military task force than a search engine. And it'll be fascinating to see the reaction of the French, with whom Google is locked into some extremely sensitive negotiations, to Senor's brand of special diplomacy."
source
"Are you talking about google news- or just plain google?
I didn't see anything wrong with google, but I have noticed a rather prejudicial slant in google news...."
Just for the official record, I meant Google.com, the actual search engine. Which is still confounding my best efforts to locate some decent information on a variety of topics, and still irritating, frustrating, and freaking me out in the process. If it hadn't been happening for a while now, and if it hadn't been happening when I tried to search for more than one kind of information--look, I'm really suspicious now. Cannonfire has talked a lot about rightwing America's desire to pollute the information systems of the world. I'm not saying that Google has necessarily made any changes or been screwed with, since nothing I've experienced can conclusively "prove" this--but one consequence of the conservative's desire to censor the search engines is that piles of legitimate, non-politicized, non-stigmatized info can get supressed in the process, as I'm sure everyone reading this blog knows. It never occurred to me that it would happen so soon, but I think maybe it has.
Google is being SCRUBBED for anything that is against Bush and Mafia.
SOMETHING IS VERY WRONG WITH GOOGLE.
Try googling anything from this website and IT'S NOT coming up.
http://usaworkstories.blogspot.com
Either Google is being paid off or something they're being hacked.
I wouldn't be surprised if Google was up to something. One of the reasons I abandoned my old Blogspot site is that I discovered that the Google-powered search bar I had on the VLWC for a while wasn't pulling-up my links to the Taguba Report. I switched my search bar to another service, but eventually abandoned my Google-owned site altogether.
Since I'm here, I'm going to jump off-topic and praise your work on the "Able Danger" story; I found your write-up at Brad Blog and found it to be stellar -- like the rest of your work, you bastard.
Not that I'm bitter. ;)
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