Don’t Be Evil, Eh?
The ever-readable Daniel1979 blog has a post on the automatic search function for Google…try typing in climategate letter by letter and see what options if any it gives you. Unless you are in the USofA then ‘climategate’ isn’t going to be one of them.
TheEye offers his humble contribution to this international quest for the truth by reproducing the experiment locally…and takes it to the extreme by, unlike Daniel’s screengrabs, using the whole word without success.
Hmmmmm. Conspiracy or something less sinister?
The same happens on google.es even though there are lots of entries in Spanish with the word “climategate” on the page after the whole word has been typed in!
Thanks All Seeing Eye for picking up on this as well; and also for your kind words.
The actual search function, (well as of earlier today) were still bringing in c13m returns – but Google are clearly not allowing this particular term in the auto-search option. I read after posting that in the US it was there, then it wasn’t so some blogs picked up on it and a few hours later was restored.
If Google have surpressed it, that would count as a political move in my book and would render questions as to whether Google and/or their search technology harbours a political bias. It was not just Europe, the Canadian search page was also affected – as was I suspect many others.
I’ve just tried this, and get exactly the same results. However when I clicked “pages from the U.K.” and then “Google Search” I did get results. Granted the first hit is a company selling gates & barriers etc, but after that the rest were relevant.
Further to my last – initially I had separated climate and gate, but I tried again with one word and all the hits are relevant. What caught me is that the auto search box covers the World – U.K. selection boxes unless you click elsewhere to remove it.
Yes, I think Daniel1979 has nailed it. The Search option does work fully, but the phrase has been removed from the auto-search which can be done manually if desired. Interesting.
Yahoo seem to be playing the same ‘trick’