A week or so ago I found out about Google’s +1 program, which allows anybody to uprate websites that participate, so that users can boost that site’s search rankings.
As has been found recently, Google has staff of people who actively downrate websites based on a number of factors, one of which is according to reports, to downgrade sites that don’t agree with the “consensus” about AGW, or which allow for a diversity of views on the topic.
Because of this, WUWT’s google search rankings have become so repressed that you simply can’t find us when searching on terms like “global warming” or “climate change”. See below how search traffic has dropped as Google made changes:
I am hoping that with active reader involvement in the +1 program, we can reverse this trend.
All you have to do is press the “+1” button at the bottom of any article you like (its down there with all the other ‘share’ buttons like twitter and facebook, etc.). Thanks for helping!
UDAPTE: 11/07/2011 345PM PST Some commenters suggest we aren’t being properly skeptical and have no basis for our concern. We do have a reference, this internal Google document:
http://www.chaddo.com/GoogleRatingGuidelines.pdf
and this analysis:
-Anthony
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When I first began investigating AGW claims using google search engines, I noticed a frustrating repression of skeptical sites. I assumed, everyone else, experienced the same, and was well aware, of the difficulty. GK
am trying to locate the +1 button on the individual post — but do not find any! I want to beat the dastard Goggle game. Peter
Would love to, but, sorry, I won’t have an account from *that* provider.
1. https://www.ixquick.com/
2. https://duckduckgo.com/
The above search engines claim to actively promote user privacy by:
• Not recording IP addresses that identify the user
• Not using tracking cookies to make a record of search terms
• Offering encrypted versions that do not route search terms to sites that can identify the user.
I did a Google search for “Global Warming” and 14 pages later still didn’t see WUWT. Surprisingly I didn’t see Real Climate either.
I then searched “AGW” since most post and comments don’t use “Global Warming”. WUWT is at the bottom of page 2.
[REPLY: the WUWT site policy is located here. Read it. Note, too, the section about “grousing about policy”. Further comments along this line will be discarded. -REP]
That is a quite entertaining statement, given the violation of the Google TOS for use of the +1 button you are engaged in with your whole “get out the vote to artificially move us up the rankings” campaign: http://www.google.com/webmasters/+1/button/policy.html
Don’t whine too hard if Google chooses to blacklist you for attempting to ‘game’ the search rankings. After all: It is right there in their TOS.
REPLY: I don’t think you interpreted the Google TOS correctly, it says:
It seems perfectly clear that they allow publishers (that’s me) to direct users to the +1 button, so long as we don’t offer prizes, mislead the purpose, and it is about our content. In the case of this blog post, we meet the TOS with no issues.
Complaint denied – Anthony
A company with a motto of ‘Don’t be evil’ is almost guaranteed to be evil in some ways! Obviously ‘evil’ is subjective – psychopaths don’t believe they are evil, they can often believe they are righteous. Most other people will disagree! For business reasons Google will record everything you do on the web, but as ‘good citizens’ they will pass this information on to authorities if asked. I have no idea if Chrome or Android does the same.
They belive in AGW so it is ‘reasonable’ to downgrade any opponenets. ‘climaterealists.com’ found this out a month or so ago. A search of ‘climate realists’ on Google had them in the top spot – overnight they were down to page 5 [when I checked]. If this site was ‘What’s up with that’ I suspect it would be similarly downgraded – use unique words for a web name!
In Europe Google gained notoriety when it was discovered that while their cars were photographing street scenes they were also checking all the wifi connections and recorded unsecured ones! They claimed it was innocent but why on earth would they do that?
Further afield, it was discovered that iphones stored all the phone’s movements [and presumably yours] for up to a year. Again it was declared as an innocent feature, but why do it in the first place. Android does the same but on a limited scale – the last 50 mobile masts and 200 wifi networks.
While all these may be done for innocent reasons, and most people have nothing to hide, it is still creepy to have your life monitored. Also, once collected it can fall in to the hands of less innocent people. It strikes me that a lot of this information is exactly what the US government would want.
Even when people mean well they may decide ‘for your own good’ to change or limit things. For example the co-founder of Wikipedia was being interviewed on the BBC about his fight with the Chinese authorities, complaining that they wanted to censor and remove items that they disagreed with, yet this hypocrite was doing exactly the same thing on Wikipedia when it came to skeptical views on Global Warming.
Dominant businesses run by idealists can be a problem when it comes to dealing with people with different ideals or outlooks, and it must be a constant temptation to try and ‘push’ these people towards their own idealogy ‘for their own good’.
Which is evil.
Google is playing games with their most valuable asset.
They did the same to Climate Realists not long ago – see link. Google seems to want to be remembered as fudging the numbers pro-AGW and manipulate search.
It is not what made Google great once. Google became great as they understood to apply the democracy in the web – let the web chose what is best and serve with best information. I do not need a nanny who tells me what is good for me.
http://climaterealists.com/?id=8416
Oh well, there are lots of other excellent search engines out there. Bing, Altavista, Ask, etc. I have been using several of them for some time because of the “Goracle” influence at Google.
If Google employs individuals to downrate sites, so be it.
I refuse to give them more information about me.
“Complaint denied – Anthony”
It wasn’t a complaint. You are perfectly free to cut your own throat with Google. It’s no skin off my nose.
I agree. And using descriptive names would be helpful for people browsing the archives.
“As has been found recently, Google has staff of people who actively downrate websites based on a number of factors, one of which is according to reports, to downgrade sites that don’t agree with the “consensus” about AGW, or which allow for a diversity of views on the topic.”
No link, no evidence, lots of vague handwaving about google searches which few people here seem to understand the mechanics behind.
Expect to see more of this sort of thing. The warmists have two options when the next several decades of increasing cold (probably starting this winter) result in ever more resistance to the idea of warming. They can admit that CO2 has a lot less effect than they are claiming, yeah, right, or they can start to take actions to silence dissent. I expect to see a ramp up of all kinds of direct and indirect censorship and attacks on skeptics which will go up in direct contrast to the temperature, the colder it gets, the more attacks. And the more the warmist agenda manages to give government greater powers, and the more those powers harm the economy and peoples lives, the greater will be the need for control of “dissent”. So if it starts to get really cold, and the warmists blame it on “extreme weather” caused by CO2, and use that excuse to gain harmful control of the economy and start to really hurt people who are already harmed by the cold (which we are not allowed to prepare for since we are not allowed to admit it might get cold as CO2 goes up), there may be a great need by our “great leaders” to silence dissent.
Just how far will they go?
According to “Toto” above: a quick search test for “WUWT”
Bing: 136,000 results
Google: 34,200 results
Yahoo: 136,000 results
I “audited” Toto’s test, with different results (about 1:24pm PST):
Bing: 156,000 results
Google: 189,000 results
Yahoo: 136,000 results
Google gives more results, not fewer.
Mike Lorrey, in the second paragraph of this post: “As has been found recently, Google has staff of people who actively downrate websites based on a number of factors, one of which is according to reports, to downgrade sites that don’t agree with the “consensus” about AGW, or which allow for a diversity of views on the topic.”
Like any good scientist or journalist, please cite a reference or source. Please.
Unsupported phrases such as “as has been found” and “according to reports” are but vague hearsay.
Well, I clicked the 1+ widget. Took me to a page that wanted me to create a Google account. Since I refuse to do such a seemingly stupid thing it may not have counted.
it would be convenient to put the +1 and other stuff up at the top before the ‘read more’ like some other sites do. then i can click them all without having to actually scroll down.
the above was only half snark.
I do see the +1 thingy at the top in other places. My guess is that it is probably there to make it easier for staff (and faithful) to go and mark everything up for the Google ranking.
There are also service companies that will (for a fee) go to your site daily up your ranking on the Google search. I have an old acquaintance that has several PC’s (several hundred IIUC) that via script give his clients multitudes of hits each day. my guess is that it brings in extra ad revenue and improves their traffic rankings so they can charge more for the ads they run.
Shady? yes. Effective? don’t know, but he seems to be since he gets paid.
From Jeff on November 7, 2011 at 2:18 pm:
From NeedleFactory on November 7, 2011 at 2:34 pm:
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/04/05/google-wades-global-warming-debate/
You may now deploy the “That’s just Fox, they’re biased” non-defense non-rebuttal, suitable if you plan to blow off the article’s linked references, ignoring the implications outlined in the “Follow the money” section.
BTW, this was found by Googling “google search climate change” and is in the first page of results. But that could be just for me. Picked up by Reuters, there’s a October 31 2011 CleanTechnica post titled “How Google is Making the Climate War Worse.” Basically, by tailoring search results to give you stuff similar to what you’ve seen before, Google is harming Climate Science™ by giving skeptical searchers even more skeptical-slanted results. As implied, this may be related to the complaints of Climate Scientists™ being unable to “communicate effectively” especially with climate skeptics, as Google isn’t showing them the best gee-whiz most recent and “thoroughly convincing” Climate Science™ results.
Personally I think Climate Scientists™ are just bad snake oil salesmen who only sell well to those who are pre-brainwashed by the assorted education systems and require government mandates demanded by socialist-leaning politicians to enact “change” or to even get further research funding for their claims that are revealed as yet continue to grow ever-more preposterous, but that’s just me.
FWIIW, when I Bing something (I don’t use google of anything but spam traps (gmail) and maps (have not found anybody with better maps on-line) I read through the “Founds” until I get past the obvious plants, then go to the next page and look for something that might be what I was searching for.
For a site otherwise ran by intelligent people with a healthy sense of skeptism regarding the ‘official’ line, it’s disconcerting just how far off the mark they can be. There are no links to back up claims of anthropogenic search bias (!) but there is plenty of evidence that a significant majority of commenting followers of this blog are not as skeptical or enlightened as they should be.
(If you sift through all the comments you’ll find two or three that offer good and rational explanations, somewhat beyond the ‘Google are evil’ rants of many others).
And just for a little balance, a quick google [google rank agw] to try and research this matter yielded this article:
http://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/2011/05/searching-for-climate-answers-on-googleplenty-of-riches-and-plenty-of-need-for-careful-wording
REPLY: actually, we do have a reference, this internal Google document:
http://www.chaddo.com/GoogleRatingGuidelines.pdf
and this analysis:
http://www.jasonfrovich.com/seo-and-search-engines/leaked-internal-google-doc-shows-how-they-manually-review-and-penalize-websites/
-Anthony
Great to see updates to the original post.
However, when the number 1 result of a google search for ‘ipcc accuracy’ (my quotes) is a link back to this site I will sleep easy knowing that all is not lost.
(Replied from my ever faithful wuwt bookmark – no google involved!)
The +1 button is not even at the bottom of this article, the whole thing is confusing, please clarify. I’ll +1 every article I can.
Been using Bing for the past year. Is Google still around?