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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,
[Thanks to Robert Bidinotto for bringing this article to my attention.] |