It seems that Mama Google is taking a hand these days in deciding what you may and may not be allowed to find on the net. Internet Censorship is being applied not just for China it seems. Try the interactive suggestions in the article. Right click on the screen captures below to open in a new window (IE) or a new tab (Firefox). The differences in search results are disturbing. Further, they appear to target the Signs of the Times news site (SOTT.net) in particular. This tactic would seem to be intended to put off all but the most dedicated of researchers. Then go back to the original and read some of the many comments this article has generated. Very interesting stuff.
Blue Ibis
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The Disappeared: SOTT.net and Google's conspicuous omissions
SOTT Editors
Signs of the Times
Fri, 25 Jan 2008 16:47 EST
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Google omitting SOTT.net from search results?
A few days ago one of our readers brought this curious detail to our attention. While searching for an article on Google, they discovered a problem with results from SOTT.net being consistently omitted from Google listings.
Our correspondent writes:
"I find just now that if you search any of the text in "quotes" from Henry See's 'Provoking Stupidity and Violence' piece on Hal Turner, Google brings back zero results from SOTT. The same text will be brought up from other sites carrying the story though.
So, say you grab the first few words from it: "Dave Neiwert at Orincus" and search it, according to Google it doesn't exist on SOTT!
But if you do the same with the title: "Provoking Stupidity and Violence", the article is there!
Other search engines do bring back the SOTT page though. Now how might that happen!?"
How indeed!
Well, our curiosity piqued, we thought it best to go have a look. Was it possible that original articles written by the SOTT team were being 'disappeared' by Google, the thread back to the author snipped? Well, lets see...
Agents, Witches and other omissions
First up is the article brought to our attention:
Provoking Stupidity and Violence: Hal Turner outed as Agent Provocateur
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| Click the images for larger view. |
Sure enough, if you copy the first few words of the article - "Dave Neiwert at Orincus" - as a search term for Google, the above is what you get and no, no sign of SOTT in there. To find SOTT we had to click "repeat the search with the omitted results included" and dig for another five pages to find where the original article lay buried.
Now that might just be some quirk of the system, so to be fair we gave it another shot with this next article written around the same time:
This time taking the key phrase "triggered by reading Victor Clube", something specific so as not to have results diluted by any possible returns from other articles. The result, one return!
So you're thinking, well that has to be SOTT right? Wrong! Click below to see the results, on the left is the solitary return from Google, on the right the "repeat the search with the omitted results included" results - where once again we find SOTT and the Laura-Knight-Jadczyk blog.
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Well, maybe these articles are 'too new' and for some reason not yet picked up by Google as 'relevant' enough. Though how a copy of an article on a lone blog in the example above is more 'relevant' than the article's originating page would seem more than a little nonsensical.
So for good measure, here we have some 'not so new' examples, to see if time has made any difference (apparently not). As above, initial quoted text search results are on the left, Google's 'omitted' results to the right.
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Seems SOTT.net is one site that Google does not want inquiring minds to visit!
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