Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach [SEE UPDATE AT THE END]
For some reason, I couldn’t find my post entitled “Gavin’s Falsifiable Science“. I wanted to track it down, in part because I think it’s one of my better posts. But when I looked on Google, it wasn’t there. Instead, I found an oddity. Here’s the top of the list of results from Google:
The list goes on below what’s shown above. I was glad to see that there are about twenty complete copies of my post floating around on various websites. And another fifteen or so links to my post.
But nowhere in that Google list was there a link to my actual post here on Watts Up With That. I looked through every Google result. No link to the Watts Up With That original version of my post.
Puzzled, I looked on Bing … where the post here on WUWT was first on the list, as you’d expect.
Below that, as with Google, are links to a bunch of other copies of my post on various skeptical websites.
Moving on, here’s DuckDuckGo … again, WUWT is first on the list, with the copies on other websites listed below it.
Hmmm … I moved on to more obscure search engines …
Same thing in all of them except Google. Google shows everything all the other sites show, all the copies, but it doesn’t show the original.
Computer “glitch”? Deliberate censorship? Unintended consequence of artificial intelligence? Cosmic ray damage? Sergei Brin found out about me and his wife? Accidental invocation of artificial stupidity? God decided to squash me like a bug for my insufferable arrogance in challenging the climate status quo? Some pinche tiranito chiquito has it in for this website?
No idea, but I certainly have seen enough ugly censorship and strangely unidirectional “accidents” and “computer glitches” to have a healthy and well-justified suspicion of the motives and actions of the social media robber barons …
w.
[UPDATE] Friday November 20 11:30AM Just tried it again, and magically Google has found it … top of the list now.
I suspect that the change might have been all of the searches from folks who read about it … without that it might have sunk into Google oblivion.
Made me check. I typed the name of an old post I’d made at Climate Etc. Myths and Realities of Renewable Energy (no quotes). Way back I remember it being at the top for just myth and renewable, but over time green slanted became more prominent. In the spirit of fair reporting was surprised this search had me at the top over the same title by EURAC (a European renewables group).
I was skeptical of Google as well. In 2014 I wrote a posting at Climate Etc. that was at the top of the list for searches on just the words Myth and Renewables for some time. Seemed like suddenly it was pushed way down by pro green references. So after reading this I tried “Myths and Realities of Renewable” (without the quotes and leaving out the last word “Energy”). Since I would have reported it had they dropped me, I’ll report that it turned out quite the opposite. They had my older posting at the top of the list, before an identically titled “pro green” publication by the EUREC (a European pro renewables group). It may be Google personalized the search for me, because I have used Google to find it before. I am curious how the search might turn out for someone else.
I did your search. Google suggested adding “Energy” too, but I didn’t.
1st: link to scholarly articles.
2nd: Judith Curry post of an article by “Planning Engineer” – https://judithcurry.com/2014/10/22/myths-and-realities-of-renewable-energy/ – so you’re still a high hit.
3rd & 4th: eurec.be, one HTML, one PDF.
7th: Wall Street Journal, paywalled: https://www.wsj.com/articles/six-myths-about-renewable-energy-1379884641
Others are mostly green sites. I don’t see climate… in the first few pages.
Thanks Ric! Good to know.
Same results for me. Of course after all the searching I’ve done on Willis’s article/WUWT my searches could well be flagged for personalization as a “climate denier” as well.
We can check that by searching while using an incognito windo.
I’m concerned this might be worse.
I just used DDG on chrome to search for ‘Google doesn’t like it’. The top result is at IOWAclimate.org, which seems to be a shadow of WUWT but with no comments.
I would guess that someone has arranged for the above site to steal all of your search hits, and it is now creeping out to other browsers and search engines – however the hell that works. I suspect a ‘demonetisation’ attack. I will also email wuwt.
I just searched for gavin’s falsifiable science, using Google, and got Willis’s post on top. I am quite sure Google does bad things of this kind, but in this case, at least for me, it seems to have retained its good manners. I did use lower case though, as stated.
About 3 hours before you made this post it started showing up for me as well where as previously it was no where to be found on google. I suspect had you tried yesterday, when Willis first posted about it, your results would have been considerably different, as mine were.
I’m guessing all of us googling the same thing, and possibly Willis’ post about it trigger someone at google to “fix” the problem. That’s the way these tech companies seem to operate. We’ve seen it in the senate hearing, a Senator points out a situation like this, and they’ll claim we don’t do that/that was a “glitch/mistake” and that the “glitch/mistake” has been fixed. Funny how all their “glitch/mistakes” go in the same direction and only get fixed, if they ever do, once complaints become public enough.
Google found it for me, first time, just for the record. That said, however, I have other grounds for not trusting Google, and have started using DuckDuckGo, largely as a result of reading about it here.
The original “Gavin’s Falsifiable Science” comes up as #1 on my browser: Firefox/Google as installed by the #2 granddaughter aka The Family Nerd.
In Google, Youtube, ResearchGate, Twitter everywhere there is some suppression of contrary views. Would you kindly launch an investigation about how is it possible by the powerful people to suppress useful and important opposite views? Those people already captured media for propaganda.
I stopped using Google years ago, many years ago, when I found out how they filter shopping search results.
The implication was obvious even then…they are not usable as a source for information, unless you want everything you are able to find to be something those %#@&^%’s want you to read.
Not much choice on the phone though, or with videos.
I am strongly considering scrubbing my FB and Twitter accounts.
Why would I want to be those people’s product?
Everyone who uses them for anything is enriching them and making them even more powerful.
This has to stop, or they will own and rule everything and everyone.
When I went to google dot com and did this search, the number one result was your article, Willis.
I can think of a few reasons why some people get different results, besides the obvious one that google is known to filter search results, and the second most obvious one that google is know to tailor results depending on what someone is expected to want to see.
I search for WUWT article a lot, specifically typing in WUWT into the query.
But I think the actual reason may have something to do with a person’s search setting.
Curious…how many who were not able to find Watts Up With That article on top, have Safe Search turned all the way off?
In the google search settings, there is one for safe search, and another for region preferred, and another for private search results, and then there is a whole page called “advanced search” settings.
How these are set up can completely alter what shows up when someone searches.
Oh, something else that alters what people see in the first page or first several pages, is what they have clicked on in the past.
Update added to the Head Post:
w.
Has anybody else noticed the irritating phenomenon of URLs pasted into the browser bar getting directed to search engines rather than taking you to the site your specified?