First the background on “Don’t be evil” as reported by Wikipedia:
In their 2004 founders’ letter prior to their initial public offering, Lawrence E. Page and Sergey Brin explained that their “Don’t be evil” culture prohibited conflicts of interest, and required objectivity and an absence of bias:
Google users trust our systems to help them with important decisions: medical, financial and many others. Our search results are the best we know how to produce. They are unbiased and objective, and we do not accept payment for them or for inclusion or more frequent updating. We also display advertising, which we work hard to make relevant, and we label it clearly. This is similar to a well-run newspaper, where the advertisements are clear and the articles are not influenced by the advertisers’ payments. We believe it is important for everyone to have access to the best information and research, not only to the information people pay for you to see.
And now this surprising screen cap I’ve been sitting on for awhile. While WUWT was the top result, the user is given the option to block WUWT results forever in Google Chrome:
That screencap is from April 22nd, 2011.
ADDED: Some folks suggest it was solely the use of the “f word” in search that triggered it. If so, why is there no block option for Lucia’s the Blackboard?
I ask readers to try getting that message to pop up searching for specific titles on Real Climate or Climate Progress and other pro AGW sites. I tried and could not back then, though it is possible the algorithm has changed in the month since I tried. I’ve also noted that once you ignore the “block all results” option, it does not appear again (for that website).
Your experience may vary, I’m only reporting mine and it appears that once you have a look at the content you get the offer to block, the option goes away. So I can’t repeat it without doing a reinstall and registry cleanse.
[ADDED: Reader Jeremy was able to get the same result with RealClimate, see here so it is good to see that it is not specific to WUWT, though that still leaves the graph below]
What prompted me to publish this screencap today? I needed confirmation that something was afoot.
Steve Milloy of Junkscience.com dropped me an email about his article Climate cleansing: Google to censor skeptics? where he quotes this from the Yale Climate Change Forum:
——————————————————–
The Yale Forum on Climate Change reports that,
… Google leads people to accurate information about climate change. Fifty-two percent of the 980 sites [returned by a Google search on climate change-related terms] contained clear statements in line with the vast majority of peer-reviewed climate science evidence. For example, if you had searched for “climate change myths” in early May, you would have found this Environmental Defense Fund site, which says, “The most respected scientific bodies have stated unequivocally that global warming is occurring, and people are causing it.”
And Google may be willing to fix this problem for the alarmists. The Yale Forum goes on to state:
Meanwhile, can search engines do a better job of pointing the public toward credible sites?
A Google spokeswoman, who insisted on anonymity because she is not a Google executive, said the company is always looking for ways to improve results. “Last year, we made 500 changes to the algorithm to improve search quality,” she said.
————————————————————————————-
So, it appears if you can’t beat them, censor them. I hope I’m wrong about that, but this graph below suggests that my traffic has been impacted by changes in search engine algorithms, Google of course being the lions share.
Here’s my Alexa search driven hits to WUWT, note the step change in mid 2010, perhaps one of those “500 changes to the algorithm to improve search quality” was implemented then:
Source: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/wattsupwiththat.com#
ADDED: Some commenters suggest “lack of interest” in climate issues as the reason for the sharp drop, compare the number of search related visits at RealClimate.org then:
The blocking option might be a one shot deal, but the step change and continued lower results (for WUWT search hits) concern me. I had a large traffic spike in December 2010, related to the COP16 climate conference worldwide interest, but no corresponding large uptick in search hits.
UPDATE: Harold Ambler points out in comments his story about what happened when ClimateGate broke, and Google’s search lagged well behind Bing at the time:
http://talkingabouttheweather.wordpress.com/2009/12/02/google-gate/
I used to like Google once, and used to support their products until very recently. I have since stopped using an Android based smartphone and ended up getting an iPad instead of my originally preferred Android based tablet. I do not use Google’s search engine and removed Chrome from all of my computers.
As for search options that allow for a modicum of privacy, I use the following:
https://ixquick.com/
http://www.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/scraper.htm
Google is like that character in Toy Story 3 “Lotsa Huggs.” One of the best villains ever in a children’s movie.
It surely can‘t be a matter of naughty words. If I type “Grattan disdain” in a Google-search, a post by me (wherein I describe her using the c-word—and I don’t mean cancer) appears, on my computer, at the top of the page.
Anthony, search on google is being personalized. your searches will differ from mine
or anybody elses. must see
http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html
The fact is, Google has long stopped to be a search engine company and has become a gigantic personal information collection and profiling, advertisement and marketing database company.
Google has been screwed up for long now.
For example, I just searched for ‘global warming’ on Google. In the first instance, globalwarmingheartland.org showed up in the first few links. Since I have Instant search turned on, the moment I actually pressed ‘Enter’, I get a slightly different set of results and globalwarmingheartland.org is gone. It does not show up on the results page. I just checked on 4 other systems and I am unable to bring up globalwarmingheartland.org in the results searching for ‘global warming’.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/50716889@N00/5739969073/sizes/l/in/photostream/
Maybe everyone who was searching has found you Anthony. I guess (not just the privilege of climascientologists) there were a large number of people milling around who had no real focus, web-wise, until this site became high on page one of results for many of the varied topics contained herein. 78 million hits, and counting, is not too shabby 😉
I think this follows a pattern. Some of us are persistent and believe that our strength in numbers will defeat this junk eventually – we stick around, in varying degrees of interestedness. Most people have neither the resilience, or time, to carry on after they realise that the whole thing is agenda driven control freakery and think they are powerless, so drift away or hope it will sort itself out. The churn rate would keep a certain level of visitors even if they were constantly being refreshed as some joined the war and some fell off the end.
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_107337052636523&ap=1
and
DaveS says:
May 20, 2011 at 9:08 am
No. It was what they planned all along. Shift production to India and cash in on the carbon credits. Worth a lot more than they paid for the company.
The blocking feature doesn’t seem to always work. Maybe it hasn’t been rolled out to all servers, or maybe at times the servers forget your state.
1. You have to be logged in to Google. (your account name will be shown in the upper right)
2. You do a search, follow a search result link, then come back to the search results page.
3. The “Block this site” will appear in the search results.
3a. Blocked sites are visible somewhere in your Google account management.
http://www.geekwithlaptop.com/google-block-site-enhancing-search-accuracy
Personally, I’ve always been partial to Ask.com (the old “Ask Jeeves” site), because they were the fist to allow more than a single word search (could input full sentences, and get results).
So, to check there, I put in the statement “F-word Fusillade”. You came up as number one. No option to block.
kadaka (KD Knoebel) seems to have the answer. On Firefox, I can get the block message on any site by clicking on it, then going back to the search. It offers that option every time on every site I tried.
Google explains what they’ve done in this video.
In summary, they rolled out a change last May that attempts to detect “content farms”, i.e. sites that contains many references to other sites rather than original content, and reduce the search rankings for these sites.
I would guess WUWT, with a LOT of references to other sites, got hit by this change.
I wonder if there’s a component of being bitten by your own success.
My http://wermenh.com/pame.html is one of the top web pages on the Pamela Smart murder case. (If someone told me during the trial I would have that page, I’d tell them they were nuts. I might have paid more attention to the trial though.)
After one Google algorithm change the Hampton NH library page moved ahead of mine, which was a bit annoying because the library site just had a list of links. I eventually concluded that Google liked the short, focused, lotsa references to her name and that my page was longer, covered more people and topics, and overall was more dilute.
I wonder if the same is happening to WUWT. Where a post used to get 30 comments, it now gets 100 or more. The overall page is now a lot longer than it used to be and if you’re searching for a phrase from the original post, the “quality” of the hit may be reduced due to the other text on the page.
I haven’t checked other sites, but with climate change losing ground as an important problem, I’d expect (hope, even) that fewer people will be looking for climate change stories. Perhaps you can add some references to Lindasy Lohan or Dominique Strauss-Kahn on each page. 🙂
As for Pame, I figured I’d just wait for the next algorithm change and a few months later I was back above the library. These days Wikipedia, the official pamelasmart.com page and other new stuff scores higher. I keep the last update date in the title, so that helps. And my page is still #1 for searches for “Pame Smart”.
Does not surprise me one bit. I have read a least half a dozen accounts of Google manipulating search results to reflect the left wing political agenda. Some may remember the Bush-Kerry election when Bush searches literally started with a page of results implying Bush was a recognized mental deficient. Google later said it may have been an employee error. There have been a bit of those “errors”.
Well, here’s a screenshot of my search results for “F-Word Fusillade”.
OK… This does work (though not in all browsers.) One way to get this block all search results is to do a google search, click on a result wait about 10 seconds and then hit the back button on your browser.
If your browser is one that it works in, it will give you the option to block. I tried this in FireFox using a seach on the evil word “puppies”. I went to the first link http://www.puppyfind.com, waited 10 seconds and then navigated back to google using the back button. I then had the option to block all results from http://www.puppyfind.com.
Here is what Google has to say:
http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1210386
Although it is a personal block list, Google does look at the lists you create for “inspiration” as to what sites are causing most problems for people.
The recent changes they made, which removed (or at least de-rated) a large number of garbage sites that always appeared high in the listings was based in part on results obtained from these lists.
Google appear to have two conflicting problems – 1) they want to make money from the search engine, and do so by forcing “answers” to the top of the list, and into that annoying sidebar. 2) The need to generate relevant results.
Number 2 is affected by people gaming the system, that is partly what the block lists are about, it give you some personal control, and it is also a source of information on what people are finding to be worthy of blocking. Unfortunately, number 2 is also affected by number 1. Google’s efforts to cram the page with paid results is rapidly making the Google search engine a pain to use.
Much as I hate Microsoft, and know darn well that once its established it will become 1000x worse than Google, I am sorely tempted to use Bing.
I expect the rankings will fall as the debate wanes. It’s actually a good sign, unless we want simply enjoy arguing over the senseless “science” of climatology.
There are plenty of Science, technology issues to discuss here.
The Google block feature should contain a feature to easily reset. Since it doesn’t, those who use it are intentionally biasing their search results. Maybe they get what they deserve. The strong survive, and the weak…….
Interesting, in my case WUWT is the 4th for the term ‘climate blog’. The first 3 are: Real Climate, Climate Progress and Climate Audit. WUWT is followed by World Climate Report – a skeptic site again.
I reject any type of personalisation because I would like to see as many viewpoints as possible. However, Google rankings are different by geographic region and web browser language.
And lest you thing http://www.puppyfind.com was somehow considered a content mill or otherwise objectionable, I was also able to do the same with searches where I clicked through to http://www.whitehouse.gov, http://www.huffingtonpost.com, http://www.realclimate.org and http://www.nasa.gov. I’m pretty sure Google doesn’t have much against any of those sites.
Not that I think a strongly left-leaning Google wouldn’t engage in censoring results (“climategate” does look suspicious,) but let’s look at other possibilities.
Google has been trying hard, for years to get “spammy” sites out of its index. They had a recent major update (Panda) that was supposed to help along those lines. Some innocent sites were hit, some junk survived, but a fair amount of junk was cleared out. Junk that anyone would agree is junk, regardless of their political leaning.
At the time G stated that it was interested in looking at crowd sourcing junk and “not junk.” I expect the “block this site” is part of that, as shown by the comments above with Real Climate blocks.
Now what if we get a bunch of energetic activist types, who realize the implications of this, who load up their Google Chrome and then make it a point to block WUWT or any other “not approved” site whenever they get a chance? That would raise a lot of flags at G central. Until the flags are cleared it seems that there is a chance there might be a penalty associated with rankings.
Also, it might be that people, becoming convinced that Warming (Gore’s version, anyway) is a scam, just aren’t searching on climate related stuff as much as before.
Google trends: climate
Global Warming – note the el nino spikes in that graph.
climate change – Note the huge (cherry picked) downward trend since the el nino spike of early 2010.
G would look like it was censoring/blocking, when it was doing no such thing. The problem with crowds determining what’s Ok is that you need honest crowds. The concept would probably work well with gardening sites, but badly with political sites.
As far as ranking for “climate blog” or related phrases, why should WUWT rank for those? Few people link to WUWT with that phrase and there’s nothing in the domain name or header which says “climate blog.”
Personally I’d take it as a compliment. Think of it this way. Google are nothing if they loose their reputation. So the most important thing to google is their reputation …Yes?
No! Making a small adjustment to your ranking seems to be far more important to google. So by definition your website is more important than the most important thing of google … it reputation which makes you almost by definition the most important website in the world, ranked by the biggest search engine.
As I said, that’s one hell of a compliment!
I quit using google long ago, when it broke that they were going along with China’s censorship campaign (which they more recently recanted). Startingpage.com uses google’s search engine, but keeps no tracking data for your searches. Bing is used as well. I was recently in the market for a new phone, and the Android phones are phenomenal, but I couldn’t bring myself to support google. Don’t care for Apple either. I’m not a Microsoft fan, but they’re the lesser of three evils, IMO. It’s not as great as the other two, but I have a phone I’m rather happy with, an HTC.
OK – here it is without the href tags:
I just tried typing “clima” sing Firefox w/Google search and got
http://i51.tinypic.com/33e4tol.jpg
I get an almost identical list when using Bing but it is a popup menu that disappears before I can capture it.
The Google search for “f-word fusillade” gives:
http://i51.tinypic.com/xwrid.png
Bing doesn’t even come close.
I did a Google search for WUWT and your site was first in the results. It did not give me the “block all…” option . I opened your site and then hit the back arrow in my Firefox browser and the block site message appeared. I tried other searches and got the same result.
I stopped using Google search engine several months ago after making a few test searches that indicated built in bias. It seems obvious that Google has politicized most of its products. Bing seems similar but somewhat less offensive. I switched to Alta Vista.
I limit my use of Goggle software to minimum, that is Maps and Earth.