Yet, news stories covering it are dropping at the same time.
I got an email from Ahrvid Engholm, an IT journalist in Stockholm, Sweden who was concerned about the “autosuggest” for the word “climategate” in Google disappearing. He was concerned about the post November 25th trend and invited me to take a look at a tool I was unfamiliar with called “Google Trends”. He writes:
Go to Google Trends – www.google.com/trends – write “climategate” and something very interesting will appear in front of your eyes. Select “The last 30 days” to the right.
I did just that, and here is the resulting graph, edited a bit to fit in the WUWT blog space, but you can see for yourself at the link provided.
Link: http://trends.google.com/trends?q=climategate&date=mtd&geo=all&ctab=0&sort=0&sa=N
Note that the trend graph is 4 days behind in data, which is apparently normal. But, there’s some interesting things happening.
Many people outside of the USA may not be aware of why there was a drop around November 25th in the Search Volume Index.
It is likely caused by the second largest US American Holiday called “Thanksgiving” which was on Thursday, November 26th. The drop starts on Nov 25th as people start their travel plans and leave the office and schools early.
Then the upwards trend resumes on November 28th when people in the USA return from that holiday.
No nefarious Google motives here. But with the rising search popularity, it does make a fly in the ointment for why Google’s “autosuggest” function in the search box is no longer suggesting “climategate” as it once was..
Does Al Gore’s position on Google’s senior advisory board have any bearing? In Al’s bio at http://www.algore.com/about.html he says:
“A member of the Board of Directors of Apple Computer, Inc. and a Senior Advisor to Google, Inc. Gore is also Visiting Professor at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.”
It seems he has done some “advising” of Google’s search quality in the past. Here’s a story from the New Yorker via Newsbusters about that very subject. There is some history there that has some bearing on the current situation.
In the case of “Climategate”, Mr. Gore’s ability to continue his current speaking engagements might be hampered. Thus, there could well be a motive for him doing some “advising” in this case. A phone call might be all it took.
Word from some others doing investigations say Google senior staff has told them the removal of “Climategate” from the autosuggest in web searches is algorithm based.
But the Google trends data suggest otherwise, particularly since it was restored and operating in Googles autosuggest feature back on November 28th, as documented here on WUWT.
Now it is gone again. Did the removal of “climategate” from the autosuggest feature make recent Google Trends data lower that the peak on November 29th? Only time will tell us.
In the meantime, I’m switching my default search engine to Bing, which doesn’t have such problems and doesn’t have Al Gore as an “advisor”.
Bing on November 28th:
click for larger imageUPDATE:
10 minutes later…
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It really looks like Google / whatever is doing different things for different viewers, even in the same country.
I didn’t spell it out loudly, but Give Me Back My Google clearly uses Google, yet Google gives 21 million returns on Climategate, and GMBMG gives 188 million.
WUWT? Ostrichgate? Carbonistagate? Goregooglegate? Climateconspiracygate? no, can’t be, I’m not an alarmist…
Terry (14:54:57) :
OT
Well I’ll be dammed! The BBC Climagate dam has just broken wide open with FOUR Climagate interviews on the Radio 4 ‘The World Tonight’ radio programme, one after the other! Here’s the game changer: Michael Mann has (in the first long interivew) DISOWNED Phil Jones repeatedly. Mann on three occasions condemned Jones for the emails he sent to him (Mann), saying ‘I cannot defend that’ and such like. This is stunning stuff
It’s every crimatologist for himself now. Mann himself is being investigated by Penn State after a furious load opf protest mails from Alumni. He may be the first to “go from Penn State to the State Pen”
Following up on my last comment, did you read of how Judy Curry trashed the railway engineer, Pachuri 🙂
The wagon’s falling apart; self-preservation is the order of the day … yeah!!!
Quoting:
“Robinson (12:27:12) :
In other news, apparently Phil Jones has been interviewed by the Police.”
Commenting:
Did Sting give him “the first degree”?
But seriously, this is where the second-string players start to pull out their token skeptical papers that they wrote for CYA. Keep an eye out!
Google is now autocompleting for climategate. I did find it interesting that if you search for the same term by 24 hrs, week, month and year on the advance search you vastly different numbers of hits.
Guys you’re all a little too fixated on the search engine thing. Google and all other search engines are very large operations that use many computers to serve the traffic.
The results minute to minute will be different because you’re request will be served by different groups of computers each time. also, the total number of hits is a guess produced by a statistical algorithm (takes too long to count 10 million pages each time). And my guess is autocomplete will be bootstrapped of the local results within their computer network so depending on which computer is answering your request you may or may not get the term “climategate”. As time goes by the term should start turning up more.
Search for Google’s “map-reduce” algorithm for a more technical understanding of how searching is handled.
Ya – yesterday I had “Clim” get climategate and then about 8 hours later “ClimateGate” didn’t even get climategate.
I checked about an hour ago and same thing “ClimateGate” didn’t get autosuggest for climategate.
But now its back to “Clim” getting climategate as top suggestion.
Google:
Climategate 197 Million
Climate gate 6.6 Million
Climate-gate 28 Million
Yahoo:
Climategate 11.8 Million
Climate gate 42.4 Million
Climate-gate 24.8 Million
Bing:
Climategate 63.1 Million
Climate gate 6.6 Million
Climate-gate 50.9 Million
Google wasn’t auto-suggesting ‘climategate’ for me when this was posted but now it is. So I don’t know if it is algorithmic or what.
While I am *delighted* to see Climategate breaking into the wider public consciousness and give thanks to all those who’ve been contributing here and CA over the years leading up to this, I’d just to implore everyone to stop pandering to silly conspiracy theories involving Al Gore and Google. You really do run the risk of allowing yourselves to be painted as paranoid cranks.
Google Suggest is an imperfect piece of kit that changes daily… hourly in response to all kinds of things. I work with Google all day every day and see results changing in ways that often appear bizarre if you’re tracking them for any purpose. I’ve even run experiments to see if I can influence the results that crop up without any success.
Like a *lot* of things in Google’s algorithm, it is nowhere near as ‘scientific’ as people think – it is, after all, a software program attempting to decipher human intention from inputted queries: a task that companies with as much money and brainpower as Microsoft have as yet failed to achieve.
Curiousgeorge (13:33:58) :
Pat Michaels (CATO) was just on Cavuto (Fox) and ripped ‘em a new one – Jones, et al. Made mention of the Google hits on Climategate. Also made a few points regarding the political end of this with the upcoming elections, etc. next Nov. Altogether an excellent interview. Should be available on the net soon.
—————————————–
Would be nice to see. After seeing Bill O’Reilly’s exceptionally pathetic handling of Climategate last night with John Stossel I began to lose faith that Fox was going to make an issue of ClimateGate. But your comment revives my hopes.
S. Andersson (14:07:50) :
Maybe it’s the Climategate Warm Period
it’s very hot at its core: several million degrees
So, I just went to Google and typed in “Climategate,” and surprise, surprise! Google has put Climategate back into the suggestion box.
However, this morning—before Watts posted this article—while I was playing around with Google, there were over 16,100,000 hits that would come up when I entered “Climategate” into the search parameter.
Now, it’s down to about 12,000,000 hits! Gee, where did 4 million hits go? If anything, the hit count should have increased, NOT decreased!
Still playing games, are we Google? Whatever happened to Google’s motto “Don’t Be Evil?”
Cheers
walshamatic (15:05:57) :
Stolen Climate E-Mails Cause A Ruckus In Congress
NPR says they were stolen. They have the scoop on that?
Actually no one knows yet how it happened. To say they were stolen is from the left of politics; the same place global warming is living from.
Hey looks like they’ve nobbled Yahoo now! I don’t get an autosuggest on climategate anymore!
FWIW Google did give me an autosuggest for googlegate after I typed in all but the last letter. About 12,000 hits.
If Google is gaming the search results, maybe somebody will come forward and spill the beans.
A better name for this would have been ‘warmergate.’
Weird… Google suggests ClimateGate for me when i write Climate. This was not the case a few days ago though.
Not only does it suggests ClimateGate, but it also suggests it before climate change. I tested this in both firefox and opera with cleared cache/history, so it is definitely not cached in my browser.
hi
if you google ‘france greenpeace assembly’, you get this among others :
http://www.france24.com/en/20091202-greenpeace-activists-french-parliament-copenhagen-environment-national-assembly
Here, there is hardly anything in the msm and this gets me, as our right gvt had included left ministers and a environment pact with loads of measures, yet green peace demands even more with a bomb alert during the day.
This isn’t even about climategate, this is sheer outright pressure with threats if they don’t agree to more greenhouse reduction agreements. Please you americans don’t hit Sarkozy, see the pressure he’s against and with a high level green movement.. it’s not easy for him. All the tv medias are silent and most of the main newspapers, yet there are alternative medias and websites that are talking about it.
Try “smartpage.com” instead of bing or google.
Dec 02 2009 08:38pm EST, typing clim, returns the word climategate at the top of the suggest list in my google search bar in IE8. Have no idea why it isn’t working for others. Maybe clearing form data, or cache will solve the problem.
THIS IS WHY I USE STARTPAGE.COM OR IXQUICK.COM FOR ALL MY SEARCHING NEEDS
Just a heads up, I noticed that there are regional differences in Google in different parts of the world, which could account for the different suggestions some users are experiencing with Google.
Here in Canada if I use …
Google.ca … (Canada) … climategate does not show up as a suggestion in the auto-suggest no matter how many letters are typed in.
Google.com … (using it here in Canada) … climategate is the first suggestion as soon as one hits 4 letters …”clim”.