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.
Google auto-suggest on Safari and Firefox on Mac OS 10.6 gives “climategate” as the number one suggestion.
I think this qualifies as breaking news:
http://2su.de/j8M
Title: Climategate: University of East Anglia U-turn in climate change row
Sub-header: Leading British scientists at the University of East Anglia, who were accused of manipulating climate change data – dubbed Climategate – have agreed to publish their figures in full.
Here’s the capper; final paragraph [quote by Prof Jones].
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.”
Yes, I’m sure that Hansen at NASA and his friends over at the NCDC would be more than happy to share their ‘data’; especially after having a week to tidy things up.
Search for climategate at http://www.ixquick.com results in:
New: Ixquick does NOT record your IP address !
75 unique top-ten pages selected from at least 49,999,915 matching results
Steve Schapel (17:14:30) :
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.)
Hey Steve,
It is well known that Google has code in place to censor the autocomplete list. That’s why “child abuse” does not show up. This is documented in this article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google
QUOTE: 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”.
I would be surprised if it took more than a few keystrokes to add a term to the censored list.
Ok, out with Google, in with Bing;-)
(hey, that’s pretty catchy!)
Screen capture of Safari and Firefox Google auto-suggest on Mac OS here –
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2656/4141662873_e8cd3f4afe.jpg
Belvedere (17:11:52) :
The sun appears to be settling in, once again, to one’s of it’s habitual SC24 snoozes. Silently mocking the warmists, especially Mr. Gore.
November sports one good display of spotted activity and a slew of blinking sub-spots.
Fizzled out.
Just googled climategate and it came up as the top suggestion after “clim”. That was at 5:30 pm Pacific time.
R Dunn (17:20:36) : Google auto-suggest on Safari and Firefox on Mac OS 10.6 gives “climategate” as the number one suggestion.
Yes, it appears that Google removed censorship of climategate from the autocomplete list sometime during the last couple hours.
It is important not to confuse this with censorship of search results. I don’t have any evidence they are doing that, though there are some anecdotal reports that the pages returned by bing are better.
Now we have another Hitler takeoff
Peer review at the Climatic Research Unit:
REPLY: Note to all commenters. I’m growing tired of people posting this video, it’s stupid, it’s insulting, and it does the same thing that we accuse the other side of doing when they label us “deniers” with all of its holocaust connotations.
Don’t post this video again.
Ya wohl mein furher,
but its pretty funny if you’ve been through all that (snip)!
-Google from Brazil: “climategate” does NOT auto-suggest
yesterday were 11.200.000 hits and today keeps going…. down = 10.800.000, 10.600.000, ….
“climategate” on brazilian pages: 2.550
-Bing from Brazil: climategate does NOT auto-suggest
today 2.060.000 hits
“climategate” on brazilian pages: 75
Google is now auto showing Climategate as the first term.
CPT Charles: “Leading British scientists at the University of East Anglia … have agreed to publish their figures in full”
Right. I want to see a copy of all the emails, and a transcript of all discussions, that led to this decision!
“SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based. ”
“In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.” ”
The dog ate my homework. But I can show you the poo.
Aussie dissent over a carbon tax…http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100018003/climategate-five-aussie-mps-lead-the-way-by-resigning-in-disgust-over-carbon-tax/
Expat in France said
Perhaps Google are in on it! Can we trust ANYONE? Will there be knocks on dissenter’s doors in the middle of the night? Are we safe in our beds? So many questions, so little time, so much to do, what with Copenhagen looming.
REPLY: I’m assuming this is sarcasm – A
ERRrrr…. Actually I am expecting that knock on the door, but they usually pick 5:00 AM not midnight and show up with several SUVs full of SWAT teams. And no I am afraid this is not sarcasm Anthony but a real fear based on the experience of the Henshaws, the Drs Faillace and others who have irritated the US government.
Mia Mony….Is it possible at this juncture to somehow rename Climategate, to go around the Google block mechanism?
If you read the above comments and all the comments on previous threads on this forum, what is the most common issue? It would seem to be the angst that this hasn’t made it to the ‘lamestream media’ and that ‘google would appear to be fudging the numbers’. Let’s remember something…. the media is not our friend here (and that includes google). These are the folks that have been cozying up to the glowbull warmongers for the last decade and are soooo invested in this pile of crap that they will NEVER report on it … at least not in any way that gives the story the breadth and scope that is deserving of such a fraud. So, what I gather from these posts is that folks are expecting that the same corrupt group that has been in bed with the IPCC/CRU at each stage of the way (supporting and giving cover to their agenda) are now going to report accurately on them and expose this whole mess to the great unwashed. Do you realize how insane that concept is? It’s not going to happen and thus the onus is on each person who has a good understanding of what is really going on to tell all those around them. You certainly can’t count on any lamestream media to be a reliable conduit for this development.
Finally, your thought about renaming ‘climategate’. I’ve been giving this a bit of thought and I agree with you. From hereto and henceforth, let us call it CLIMEDIAGATE. First of all, the word ‘gate’ indicates scandal – it is a well recognized suffix and since we are dealing here with something that is totally outrageous and scandalous, ‘gate’ should be part of any term that defines the entity. Secondly, there are actually two scandals here…. the first and obvious one is the scandal that is what has gone on with the IPCC/CRU with respect to their corruption related to ‘hide the decline’. The second scandal here is the media…essentially, their willingness to go along with the IPCC/CRU and do their bidding over the past 10 years… and now that the CRU email exposure is out there for all the world to see, the media almost on mass has just decided to deep-six the whole darn thing and hope it goes away. Why? They are totally invested in the whole thing being true because they wanted it to be true. Remember the lesson from Watergate…. it wasn’t the original crime – it was the cover up. In this case, it would seem that people are hoping that the ‘cover-uppers’, aiders and abetters (i.e. the media) are going to be the one that expose this story to the masses. They are in essence, the other-shoe-dropping of this scandal…… hence it really is CLIMEDIAGATE. This term describes it perfectly! Think about it…. what do you get when you have intimate relations between one (or possibly both) partners with an STD? You get something that thought sounds like climediagate…. and something that is a disease that smells like a town in Denmark.
There’s new reason for tourists to pose in front of Tom’s Diner (above which James Hansen works).
The ‘Fire James Hansen’ group on Facebook still has only 444 users though.
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=38654137&id=117216#/group.php?gid=53080958739&ref=search&sid=117216.525675637..1
Aww, damnit. Bing doesn’t have a spell checker….. I wish they’d put a spell checker on it it… It’s the only feature I ever used on google’s.
Too bad they fixed Googlebombing. It would be fun to link Wikipedia’s Global Warming page to the searchwords “miserable failure.”
Kathyryn….The internet is all that stands between us and totalitarianism.
Bingo… you have exactly defined where we are at. I have no idea what country you are located in but it doesn’t mater, your statement is true no matter where you are.
Google autosuggest is weird. For me (Italy) with google.com will give climategate with the first “c”, then only with “clim”.
If you see the list split in two, the first part is about your past searches that Google remember. Here I have 10.7 M hits for climategate,
Testing google.co.uk I see the same if my language is italian, but if I set the language to english the autosuggest don’t give any climategate suggestion.
I set japanese as language (with co.uk) and they gave me climategate, climate-gate, “clima frode” (this is italian for “climate fraud”)
Interesting enough, “clima frode” is the first suggestion Bing gave me.
The data set is limited and the fact that we can not account for these result is a travesty!!!!
Anyone from Germany, Holland, Finland, Uzbekistan would like to tell their results?
Steve Schapel (17:52:10) :
There’s that, and I’d be equally interested in the emails between the CRU, NCDC and NASA in the week following ‘Climategate’.
As confidently stated by Prof Jones, I’m quite sure all the data to be ‘offered’ will be quite ‘in order’.
Roger Sowell (15:58:46) :
What makes you believe that Microsoft’s search engines have found 50 million new web pages that reference climategate and disbelieve Google’s claim?
I told Bing to start at reference 10,000, and it popped up page 96 with the message 951-952 of 952 results.
Try http://www.bing.com/search?q=climategate&first=10000&FORM=PERE3
Trying the same with Google with http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&num=20&q=climategate&start=10000&sa=N I get “Sorry, Google does not serve more than 1000 results for any query. (You asked for results starting from 10000.)”
Starting at 980 with http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&num=20&q=climategate&start=980&sa=N I get “Results 701 – 718 of about 10,900,000 for climategate.”
Folks, I am really disappointed in the quality of research in this thread. You don’t believe a thing that Hansen, Mann, etc say but you believe claims from search engines without making any attempt whatsoever to verify them? Worse, people are taking the responses and going way out on a limb to determine what the search engines are doing and armed with such flimsy conclusions are going off to battle.
Notes:
I’m proud to call myself a skeptic and accept the responsibility that comes with the title.
Common sense applies – it takes weeks for Google’s web crawlers to indes the web, how it it possibly have found 10 miilion references in a few days?
Read up on what Google does for searching the web – they use a bunch of PCs hooked together in odd ways. They are are not a monolithic central server that handles all search requests. I haven’t checked in on that in a decade or so, but I haven’t heard of major redesign.
Just because there is a reference to climategate, it doesn’t mean that it’s any good. There’s still something to be said for quality over quantity.
Chuck the giddiness. Check the data.
youtube.com is currently having this problem as well. It does not come up in the drop-down suggestion box.