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.
Is it possible at this juncture to somehow rename Climategate, to go around the Google block mechanism? “Gate” is kind of “hack”neyed anyway, isn’t it? More to the point, this issue desperately needs to be about reining back in science fraud, & the demand for the word “hacked” to be put in its place. The odds this was “hacked” by an outsider rather than leaked by an insider are truly miniscule. Emphasizing that the info was supposedly “hacked” is simply an attempt to block the option of court action against these crooks, nothing more. This is not some minor transgression, this is cheat science. Challenging this NOW is the equivalent to bringing down of the Berlin Wall erected by alarmists, in the pay of corporations ready to become trillionaires from global carbon taxes. Climate communism is more like it. It is that important, especially regarding the threatened future of sovereign nations & the last stand battle to retain a semblance of real democracy. Climate warms & climate cools. It is SCIENCE which is on trial here. If SCIENCE can be bought, we might as well be in the dark ages. Emphasis on the word “hack” is meant to distract the non discerning from the REAL issue by trying to make those who posted the truth look immoral, say, compared to those who lied & fudged data to make climate look quite other than it is. Hackers are boasters & pranksters. They do not quietly drop info into the public realm & then quietly leave again. This is NOT the profile for hackers at all. It is however the profile for whistle blowers on the inside. Someone had had enough of deception & decided it was time to bust a hole in the “immunity to question” clause of climate hysteria fed daily. That oxymoronic term “climate scientists, is only a “science” in its infancy, based on abstract computer models designed by people who spend all their time INDOORS. Cooling & warming inside this ailenated reality is totally artificial, as fake as the fudged data. No amount of protest is going to make this truth go away. The truth, even if blocked, has legs. Look who is in denial now.
Gary K I don’t think accusations like this are helpful. They make us look paranoid. If you have evidence it was removed manually, i.e. not the result of the algorithm selecting the best response, then please show it. Otherwise, I’d give them the benefit of the doubt. If it still didn’t show up in, say, a month, I’d either think it was deliberately removed or that the algorithm was pants. I think the latter would be my preferred answer here.
I agree that such accusations could look paranoid at first glance and should be avoided if there is no evidence to support them. But I think we have plenty of evidence to prove them in this case. First, there are plenty of folks who will testify that climategate had been appearing in the autocomplete suggestion list for a number of days before it was removed two days ago. It began appearing for me when the Google hits were around 20,000 if I recall correctly. This makes perfect sense because Google uses an algorithm to automatically add keywords to the autosuggestion list. Unfortunately, I don’t have access to that algorithm so I can not PROVE that climategate would have been automatically added. This is why I have to use personal testimony and basic logic on this point. Furthermore, comparison with other keywords in the autosuggestion list show that many things with relatively few hits (such as old songs) come up in the list. Any algorithm that automatically includes obscure items with a smaller number of hits would certainly include something like climategate. Indeed, it was included, and then removed, so we know it was a human choice, not an algorithm.
Given the above review of the facts, I think the accusation that Google censored the keyword climategate from its autocomplete list is fully justified and not paranoid in any way at all.
If you go to nocapandtrade.com you will see a list of companies to boycott. Google is on the list.
These are all multinational companies who have decided that profit is the goal.
Smokey (14:32:23) :
If Bing returns millions more hits on “climategate” than Google, isn’t it doing a more thorough search?
Dang nab it Smokey, all of those counts are merely estimates, Google, Bing, Yahoo, the whole bunch estimate. They never have an exact count on results since they have to short circuit their actual result retrievals otherwise you could sit forever waiting for search results.
Belvedere (16:42:15) :
uhm.. What is up with the latest SOHO picture?
Is our sun really going to die?
Nope,just napping for oh,30-50 years….
I thought I’d try doing a search on the website of New Zealand’s largest newspaper, the New Zealand Herald.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/climategate/search/results.cfm?kw1=climategate&kw2=&op=all&searchorder=2&display=10&start=0&thepage=1&st=gsa&mediatype=Any&dates=Any
Search Results for climategate
Sorry, no results found for keyword(s): climategate
Then BING it will be from now on!!!
*turns up the heater*
Isn’t this the real doom?
I mean.. Is it not going to get very, very cold in the near future?
Brrrrrr..
Just checked google again.
Typing…
“Cli” now has Climategate in 7th place.
“Clim” now has Climategate in first place.
I find it amazing that we can castigate the Chinese and Iranian governments for censoring the internet – especially in light of this form of censorship. So much for illusory freedoms…..
Me too. Google chose to cooperate with the Chinese government to censor any web page talking about Tienanmen Square and other stuff deemed “harmful” to the Party. Read this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google
They censor lot’s of terms relating to bad things like child abuse and racial hate. I’m fine with that. But with a few keystrokes, they can use the same software to eliminate climategate, which is precisely what they did.
He added: “Our global temperature series tallies with those of other, completely independent, groups of scientists working for NASA and the National Climate Data Centre in the United States, among others. Even if you were to ignore our findings, theirs show the same results. The facts speak for themselves; there is no need for anyone to manipulate them.”
Don’t CRU and GISS ultimately use the same data to produce results? Are the CRU not fudging their data and GISS fudging their data, then the two datasets are combined to give, suprise suprise, the same results for CRU and GISS?
PaulS (16:59:45)
…And don’t both CRU and GISS submit their data back to NOAA after taking the data from NOAA originally and running their Al-Gore-rythems?
Don’t worry too much about Google hit counts. They go up and down all the time. For example, the search count for my website is always higher on the weekdays then on the weekends, but the weekend numbers are almost always the same, and the weekdays numbers are almost always the same. I suspect this happens because of their computer maintenance schedule.
mRE (16:56:28) :
Just checked google again.
Typing…
“Cli” now has Climategate in 7th place.
“Clim” now has Climategate in first place.
Which google extension are you using? Google.co.uk still doesn’t show this…
Mia Nony
Is it possible at this juncture to somehow rename Climategate, to go around the Google block mechanism? “Gate” is kind of “hack”neyed anyway, isn’t it?
Yes, it’s a bit “hackneyed” but that can be good because then everyone knows what it means so it has a very potent easily understood impact. The connection with Nixon is also good given that the New York Times illegally printed the Top Secret Pentagon Papers on the front page of their paper! This makes a mockery of their refusal to deal with the content of the emails on the pretext that they were “obtained illegally.”
And then we must remember that climategate is pretty much the name this baby received the day it was born. I think we should stick with it.
If you really want to see some bias search on Wikipedia and you will find a whitewash version that could have been (maybe was) written by Phil Jones along with:
“This page is currently protected from editing until disputes have been resolved.
This protection is not an endorsement of the current version. See the protection policy and protection log for more details. Please discuss any changes on the talk page; you may use the {{editprotected}} template to ask an administrator to make the edit if it is supported by consensus. You may also request that this page be unprotected.’
I tried Al-Jazeera. Nothing.
I tried leaving a comment at Al-Jazeera. There are countless blogs but no comments on any of them. My comment is still “being approved.”
NPR. Nadda.
BBC. Nadda.
Some genius at YouTube steared me over to WikiLeaks. “Thank goodness for WikiLeaks,” he cried.
The coverage is awful.
Guys think about this..
The sun is as dead as a guinie pig monkey floating on an airbed compressed and pumped full of and with CO2..
It sinks..
And it stinks..
U know what i think? They (the elite) try to stop this global cooling at any cost, at any prize.. They just found out HAARP doesnt work the way they want.. Mother nature cannot be controled..
Raining for 2 weeks in row here btw.. 😉
*maximum heating on*
You folks chasing Google’s placement of a specific word in a suggestion list are likely to get differing results until the information that is used by the display system gets pushed to all of Google’s millions of clusters the process takes quite a bit of time in the meantime you are directed to a different set of machines just about every time make a request of Google.
It is useless to attach any actual meaning to where something shows up.
“Yeah, but if you do a google news search, news.google.com, and you just type in the letter c , you will see that climategate is the first suggestion. This means that it is on the top of peoples intrests, at least in the news section.”
Intersting, you are very right.
However, when I went to do it just now, what was the Second story on the Google News home page (before doing a search) “Leaders say momentum building on climate change “
The Google climategate block is still on in Australia as at 1.13am GMT)
I haven’t even looked at Google for many months now… Bing is so effective and has so many nice features. But I would be wary about assuming any kind of censorship of the autosuggest list, as I would expect this is automatically generated. I would be truly amazed if anyone had manually adjusted it. (But then, I have been truly amazed about a lot of things lately.)
One more; a quote from another blogger who describes himself as a student of net censorship since the 90s. ”
If you were to draw up a matrix of political and economic policies, of every country in the world, and look for overlap, look for areas where they all pretty much agreed, in actions, if not in words, you’ll find just three or four areas. One would be that they are all into this climate change crap. Another that they’re all (increasingly) censoring the internet within their borders, and in some case outside. And a third, interestingly, is that they are almost all shifting intellectual property breaches from the civil code, to the criminal code.
I don’t believe this is coincidence.
The internet is all that stands between us and totalitarianism.
I think that we should have some consideration for the past and (especially) current students of the University of East Anglia. In all probability, any qualification they obtain(ed) from that organisation will be deemed as laughable. How would you feel if your whole life had been blighted in that manner?