Permanent link for article #0083:
12-04-2009

Permalink



Google
Subject: Climategate begets Googlegate

In a nice piece of investigative work, Harold Ambler reports on his website, Talking About The Weather, about Google's apparent attempt to minimize the damage being done by the Climategate scandal, by removing the term "Climategate" from Google's auto-suggest function. Harold reports that as the scandal was initially breaking, it was possible to type the letters "c-l-i" and see a suggestion for "climategate" displayed. As the news reports continued to mount, the number of relevant hits for climategate continued to rapidly rise, currently yielding just under 30 million hits. Despite this, Harold notices that as of December 1st, Google would no longer offer "climategate" as a suggestion.

Why?

Harold contacted a person in Google's global communications department and asked for an explanation, but received no satisfactory answer. Read his article for the entire disturbing story.

Note that as of December 4th, Google will suggest "climate gate" as a possible entry (currently with about 10 million hits), but "climategate", with three times as many entries, has still gone missing.

To fully understand this story, it is important to know that Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO and Chairman, has been a vocal supporter of Barack Obama, and an advisor to the current administration on energy policy. Quoting from Wikipedia,
    "He [Schmidt] proposed that the easiest way to solve all of the United States' problems at once, at least in domestic policy, is by a stimulus program that rewards renewable energy and, over time, attempts to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy."

This shows that he is not a disinterested party with regard to this topic. Could these results be benign. Possibly. However, it is certainly not obvious that an unbiased mathematical algorithm would operate in this manner, thus leading to the speculation that the results are being massaged in service of a political agenda.

[Thanks to Robert Bidinotto for bringing this article to my attention.]
For the most recent articles, see the Home page.