View Full Version : Search engine Censorship?
I don’t know if this is something that only happens with Google or all search engines.
The terms/results for searches tend to fluctuate in numbers, that is normal as web pages come and go. Using Google results I’ve been pointing out that the term ‘United Statesian’ (searched without the quotes) was growing at about 1,000 entries per month, at some point it reached close to 20,000 results for the query. About a month ago somebody in Google must’ve noticed this and decided to trim the numbers, it soon went down to 13,000 then 4,000 now there are less than a 1,000 returns for the term United Statesian. IMO this is nothing short of censorship of the web.
Clearly Google is a privately owned company (as supposed to public/state owned, not as publicly traded in the stock exchange) and as such capable of displaying/censoring whatever they want. However, I’m interested in finding out other terms we know they are censoring.
Do you know any other terms censored by Google?
Does this happen with all search engines?
Should there be a public (State owned and operated) search engine without an agenda?
Would it be possible to have a public (State owned and operated) search engine without an agenda?
If they did not purposely censor the term, how do we explain the disappearance of 20,000 results in about 40 days?
Alien abduction...(?)
Marcia
09-19-2006, 01:41 PM
OK, United Statesian (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=United+Statesian), as defined in urban slang. What's the big deal with the phrase? And why in the world would any company in their right mind pay someone a big salary to sit and go through multiple thousands of web pages to decide which ones to keep in the index or not?
Chris Boggs
09-19-2006, 02:17 PM
yeah I am with Marcia on this one. It seems like some kook has gone around pasting the same lame arguments for the use of "united statesian" in many places. one example can be found as the last comment here (http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/000525.html), which is a direct paste of the Urban Slang def posted by Marcia. (mod hat off) as a side note, the 3rd example particularly hampers the ability of the argument to sound legitimate. The rest of the examples also show the real motivation behind the post: that is to discredit/complain about US foreign policy (mod hat on)
Ideas like this do gain a certain level of burstiness (http://straddle3.net/context/03/en/2003_03_07.html) for a bit, but I think the bubble has popped on the use of this term, and therefore the diminishing results are to be expected. Even huge events which trigger millions of results see drops in results after a period of time.
Again, like Marcia says, this is not a Google "hand job." However it is possible that many of the mentions of this term may be on sites which have been removed from the index for other reasons.
mcanerin
09-19-2006, 02:45 PM
As much as I find it annoying to be constantly referred to as an "American" (I don't have a problem with Americans, but I'm not one. I'd also object to being called a woman, priest, etc.), I'm not seeing a reason to find this being censorship.
People losing interest in a term isn't censorship, it's simply people losing interest. A lot of fall-off for one-click wonders like this happens because the links and content is on news-style sites, and when the newsworthiness dies off, the content is removed or archived.
Being boring is different from being censored, IMO.
Ian
My interest here is not on the term ‘United Statesian’ but in the actions of Google, I know for a fact the numbers I mention are accurate. So that being the case is it logical to assume that 95% of the occurrences disappeared in little over a month? To me this seems highly unlikely. I don’t think that this was done manually, a simply entry into the search engine would do it. I just searched the term again and it is back up to 12,300 in case it disappears I did a screen capture :-)
Anyways, my question really is: What terms do we know Google censors?
1.- United Statesian
2.- ?
3.- etc.
Marcia
09-19-2006, 03:27 PM
I don’t think that this was done manually, a simply entry into the search engine would do it. And how would such a simple entry be done, if not by hand?
What terms do we know Google censors?None. We don't know that they censor anything at all.
Added:
Correction! hamster dance (http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLD,GGLD:2005-11,GGLD:en&q=hamster+dance) has only 1,980,000 pages returned and there were WAY more. Google is censoring the hamster dance.
PhilC
09-19-2006, 03:46 PM
Eli. Google isn't censoring your expression at all. If they were censoring it, why would they leave any instances in the index?
The number you see vary for a number of reasons. One of which is that you they are returned to you from different datacenters, and another is that the index is frequently changed.
What's happening is that you are seeing something you didn't expect to see, and you are assuming that Google is acting against your preferences, because the results are not in line with your preferences. I even know of one person who truly believed that Google was compiling the results especially for him, so that he was receiving different results to everyone else.
mcanerin
09-19-2006, 04:54 PM
If it was being censored, don't you think it would not have gone back up to 12k+?
Google does censor. And edit, and make choices. The very nature of a search engine is to decide what is relevent and what is not, then order it.
Additionally, there are legal requirements in various jurisdictions. Google is heavily censored in China, and France and Germany have strong censorship regarding Nazi symbols, among other things.
Further, a lot of spam is left out, as well as duplicate content, to a degree. It's also really hard to find illegal things on Google such as illicit MP3's, certain types of pornography, and so forth.
Everytime a search engine refines it's filters, some sites are left out, and some are included. There is no need to waste storage space on sites that will never meet quality standards high enough to show to someone, for example.
I would not consider a term censored unless either it resulted in no results at all, or results that are not representative of the information known to be available. That's different than simply not listing all possible references containing a term, which is more of a technical issue than a social one.
Ian
Thank you everybody for your responses, I believe Ian's response pretty much hit the nail on the head.
Again, thanx.