Note: title suffix – “autosuggest still blocked” has been removed, see update2 at bottom of story.
We’ve had the term “global warming” in the lexicon since well before the Internet became a household tool, certainly well before Google itself.
So it is with amazement that I report the rise of a new term, “Climategate” in just a little over 1 week in the Google search engine.
Here’s our old friend “global warming”:
And here is the new term that is spreading like lightning, “climategate”:
global warming – 10,100,000
climategate – 10,400,000
Note that these are web searches, not news searches, but Google suggests a few news stories first. These two searches were conducted about 1 minute apart.
Individual results and search permutations may vary, but it sure seems like “climategate” has grown virally in since the story on the CRU files broke on November 19th.
Here are some other interesting tidbits about “climategate”.
Google seems to be blocking their search box suggestions from using the word, reports on WUWT and my own observation two days ago indicate it was once there. I used by upper right Google Search Box in IE8 to find out.
For example “global war….” has lots of suggestions:
And so does “climate”:
I find it interesting that climate depot and climate audit are suggested ahead of climate progress.
But even when you spell out almost the enirety of “climategate” Google doesn’t seem to think it’s worth suggesting to you:
With “climategate” now as big as, likely even bigger than “global warming” on the web, Google might want to rethink this.
UPDATE: From comments I see that “Bing”, the new search engine from Microsoft, has no such problems, and in fact puts “climategate” right at the top after only 3 letters “c l i”:
I thought the Langjokull Glacier in Iceland was a nice touch. Bing apparently rotates backgrounds, so who knows what you’ll see.
UPDATE2: About 3 hours after this story was first posted, it appears that Google has added the word “climategate” to autosuggest.
Squidly,
“Perhaps someone in Russia should educate that guy eh?”
Come on Squidly, didn’t you know he is employed by WWF?
Vern,
“Leading British scientists at the University of East Anglia….
If there is a phrase that the lamestream has adopted that wants to make me hurl it’s this one (at least the lamestream that does stoop to report on this mess).”
Well, I would say, that drawing attention to their prominence is a bad move on their part, because othewise people would take less notice. For example, when I sent an email link to a friend about this, he didn’t know who Hadley are and recognised only the UEA bit. Not surprisingly, his reaction was “so what? This just sounds like some obscure group of academics – what relevance do they have on climate science?”
Unbelievable reaction? But that’s what 99% of the population would think: who are these guys and what’s the big deal. But now, the damage controllers come along, and what do they do? They tell everyone that these are prominent scientists, global scientists of the highest order. Now people sit up and take notice: What, you mean these are the guys have been telling us that we’re overheating the planet? You mean it’s those guys?
Email Ed Milliband (http://www.edmilibandmp.com/) at milibande@parliament.uk and tell him what you think!!!!
e.g.
”
Dear Ed,
Are you aware of the breaking ClimateGate scandal?
Don’t you think we need to postpone signing any treaties at Copenhagen until we have investigated fully whether or not the true science actually suggests that Anthropogenic Global Warming is occurring and is caused by CO2 emissions?
Please be aware that despite what you may think, there is not a scientific consensus on Climate Change, there is only an unscientific nodding-dog consensus amongst scientists. By this I mean to say that it appears that there are many scientists who have read the conclusions of a small group of other scientists, who peer review each others work without external scrutiny, and have taken what they say as fact without reproducing the results (and how could they since the data upon which the results are based are kept secret despite multiple Freedom of Information Act requests?). This is the source of the so-called “scientific consensus”, but as you will be aware, science is not a democracy! Science is the study of facts, of empirical evidence.
The scientific method *requires*, this bit is not optional despite any excuses of proprietary data being involved in a study, the reproduction of results by other independent scientists. This has not been done in the so-called field of Climate “Science” and it is therefore not a field of science at this time and we ought not base policy on its results until all of the data and methods have been released into the public domain and independent scientists have successfully reproduced the results and reached similar conclusions.
Please push for a full and public inquiry into the ClimateGate affair.
Kind Regards,
Ph.D.
“
Joe (04:50:27) :
> HERE IS PHOTOGRAPHIC PROOF OF GOOGLE’S TAMPERING:
> http://i48.tinypic.com/2qjhms6.jpg
DON’T SHOUT, WE CAN HEAR YOU!
How is this proof?
Tampering, at least to me, implies willful changing of data by a human.
Consider this a peer review, please address these questions/observations/requests:
Google’s systems are distributed. You seem to be assuming a search you do will exactly match a search someone else does at the same time yet you provide nothing to support that.
Google has become quite sensitive to “Googlebombing” as described in other posts. Is it possible that the sudden increase in the appearance of the new term climategate and apparent interest in searching for it has triggered defensive software at Google?
Google is also very sensitive to people trying to boost the page rank of their website. In my experience, Google changes their ranking algorithms frequently, does not document them outside of generic details. By now I believe they are fairly complex, but I don’t know the details. I think you need stronger evidence of tampering before I would recommend publication of your results.
It is well known that the hit estimates offered by Google is far from reality. My assumption has been that they are trying to reduce load on the search computers. I have documented that in previous posts. Why are ignoring my evidence and prior research to blind accept hit counts as anything significant?
I show above that Google may only have found 758 pages referring to “climategate”. Is this enough to warrant including that their autosuggest software?
What do you know about how the autosuggest algorithm and heuristics work? Please include references to research papers, white papers, and other resources on the that provide a starting point to support whether or not climategate should be included.
What do you believe Google’s interest is in tampering? What evidence do you have to support that?
46.400.000 hits for global cooling on Google
It seems that other groups are unhappy with Google as well.
Well, we had that ‘black google’ crap which clearly shows google is bought and paid for. I’m deleting google from my computer and using another search engine now. Incidentally, no climategate coming up when I start typing it in.
What is even more weird is that currently Google only offers ClimateGate when you enter cli, however Bing offers ClimateGate, clip art, climate change and many others starting with cli.
Surely, no algorithm is doing that. Well, expect one that has a hit list, and override list, you know what I mean.
As of this morning, the climategate autosearch is missing from Google, once again. This conspiracy runs deep and wide, these are very dangerous games they are playing, and we are watching.
Patrick Davis (19:30:12) :
Patrick, I understand your point. I was commenting on the thinking that in January of 2000 most rational thinking people looked back at Y2K “bug” with a different perspective (as “poppycock” – your term).
I think that the same will occur here with Climategate. Six months from now the perspective on AGW will be fundamentally different than it was before this event occurred.
Does that mean the AGW crowd will go away ? ..or will the left leaning MSM suddenly do stories on the polar bear population growing ? ..or the IPCC issue a revised position ?
Doubt it. There are still those who believe Y2K was legitimate. Ut the playing field is in the process of changing…
Richard Sharpe (08:34:01) wrote:
OK, on further checking, they are only offering up things I have searched for before and selecting from among those. So the climategate autosuggest feature is actually off and they have not hardwired the result to climategate.
mkurbo,
“There are still those who believe Y2K was legitimate.”
Y2K was legitimate. I made a nice living for a few years correcting for this. To put the problem in perspective, many legacy applications allowed only a 2 digit year, so that you get problems doing date comparisons. Is 001031 (October 10 2000) greater or earlier than 991031 (October 10 1999)? Any computer program would have said earlier than 1999 and this would cause all sorts of incorrect logic pathways to be activated in the code.
There were 2 methods for fixing: 1) doing a data conversion to use the 4 digit year, or 2) more commonly apply date windowing. In the second case I would have added code so that if the year was say > 30, then century 19 would be assumed, else century 20. Obviously, the cutoff you chose had to relate to the meaning of the date.
Eventually, the Y2K problem did not manifest itself in the way hyped by the media because it was vastly over hyped and it was fixed anyway. Yep, we sure did a good job on that old Y2K bug.
As of nov 29 1:00pm EST Google is showing me about 10,600,000 hits for climategate
about 34,200,000 hits for global warming
Looks like a lot more on gw than were being reported yesterday
Using quotes has almost no effect on gw numbers, but cuts cg numbers by about a factor of 10
Adding quotes to global wa
This is disgusting. There is no legitimate reason for climategate to have been left of of Google’s auto-suggest. I have just switched all of my browsers’ home pages from Google to Bing.
Finally!! Global Warming and all of their zombie followers are being shown for who they are…Frauds and Socialists! We are bombarded every hour of every day on all of the things that are going to kill us and what a holes we all are. Even my wife who si dumber than a post hole digger knows it is all B.S.
Of course Google is on it!
You dont need the government to force you to recycle or to stop making cows fart including my wife.
Anyways I hope any of the blind followers and their wacko leaders enjoy reading the climate gate e-mails.
Long live the sun!!
Google receievd criticism of their censoring climate skepticism. Suddenly there is a big story about Michelle Obama and a controversial picture. Google claim they are such supporters of Freedom of Speech that they won’t delete from their web searches. All hail google.
The story ‘broke’ just after climategate and their censoring even though the picture had been around for A LONG time beforehand.
It was a created story to make Google look good and help cover up ‘climategate’.
Fight the power.
REPLY: seems like a reach to me, more likely coincidence -A
Those lovely folks at Twitter — you know, the people who are going to “replace the traditional search engine” with their “up-to-the-minute Tweets of all the latest news” — have barely heard of it. I haven’t seen it in the “trend” list at all over the past few days (although to be fair, I spend almost no time on Twitter and had to keep reminding myself to check), but such important topics as “New Moon,” “omgfacts,” and “Chelsea” are doing fine, thank you very much.
That’s not to say, of course, that nobody is Tweeting about it. A search turns up a respectable number of comments; but for a community that bills itself as cutting-edge for global communications, it’s pretty lame.
Y2K was ILLEGITIMATE.
The claims were CONTINUOUSLY made that DISASTER WOULD STRIKE.
A bunch of ARCHAIC (now mostly replaced) financial mainframes in COBOL had a potential Y2K problem.
Yeah, thanks scare mongers, I got some EXTRA $$$ too, “fixing” a trivial problem.
But I still mention it at “confession” (old fashioned Catholic).
Last comment for the DAY..
Search Global Warming (15,000,000 hits), Climategate (49,000,000 hits, and
Climate Change (50,000,000) hits, on BING.
I think BING gets the BINGO on this!
Check this update to the Censorship by Google wiki page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google
Google also censors its search suggestions in the United States. “Dirty” search suggestions end in an apostrophe, period, or hyphen. Suggestions containing the words “teen” or “teenager” are forbidden. “Child abuse” is notoriously blocked as well, but not “abused children”. Suggestions for “physical neglect” and “emotional neglect” are used as code words for “physical abuse” and “emotional abuse”. All queries containing “hate” are censored as well. For example, instead of “Why did Hitler hate Jews?”, a suggested query is “Why did Hitler hated Jews?”. More recently, Google has been censoring search suggestions skeptical of climate change, i.e. “Climategate” is forbidden, but “climate change” is ok. Also both “climategate” and “climate gate” search results went from over 12 million to around 6 million results for both. “climate gate” should always yield more than “climategate” as teh Google search algorithm should find all sites containing “climategate” and sites containing both “climate” and “gate”, but “climate gate” yields less results than “climategate”. This is pointed to as undeniable evidence of tampering since the results are violating the rules of their own search algorithm.
We should start a betting pool to see how long this information is allowed to stay on that page. I bet it will be removed within 12 hours.
Comparison between Google and Bing on three key terms. Search carried out within the last ten minutes:
climategate (single word; needs no quotation marks),
“global warming” (phrase; needs quotation marks)
“global cooling” (phrase; needs quotation marks)
************************
Google searches engine:
Climategate 13,200,000
“global warming” 9,730,000
“global cooling” 603,000
*****************
Bing searches in the last few minutes:
climategate 50,100,000
“global warming” 13,300,000
“global cooling” 48,100,000
***************
Conclusion: Google is probably a better search engine than Bing. No need to get upset. Facts and figures speak for themselves.
Now entering “clim” on google turns up “climategate” as the first suggestion, right above “climate change”
Maybe it just takes a while?
yonason (12:07:03) :
Now entering “clim” on google turns up “climategate” as the first suggestion, right above “climate change”
Maybe it just takes a while?
It first appeared in their autocomplete suggestion list about a week ago when the hits got up to about 20,000 if I recall correctly. It was in the list until three days ago when they censored it. Then the news broke all over the web (many thanks to Anthony!) and they put it back in for a while yesterday. Then they removed it again but now it is back in for me, though I have received reports from other countries that it is still mission.
“A bunch of ARCHAIC (now mostly replaced) financial mainframes in COBOL had a potential Y2K problem.”
Really, I’m glad you are an expert on the mainframes having been replaced at financial institutions.
Further the problems with date handling started to show up in the 1970’s at financial institutions. In the United States every bank was required to certify their software could handle the century change prior to the event happening.
How would I have a clue, you ask, well I have the sweatshirt, t shirt, and even a millennium countdown clock because I cleaned up several very large systems and there would have been hell to pay if they hadn’t been attended to. The financial institution wasn’t small either. Likely you have done business with it.
“Hide the decline” comes up with … 1,840,000.