Censored PrisonPlanet / Charlie Sheen Story

[fulton savage]

G was 2 days late on indexing the Charlie Sheen 9/11 story.

PrisonPlanet has the screen shots...you can see the News affiliate link to the Boston Herald story at the top of the SERP, but no natural results at all.

http://prisonplanet.com/Pictures/mar06/230306google.jpg

This story has been all over prisonplanet.com for 4 days now, not to mention the major news outlets running the story.

Censorship or not?

http://prisonplanet.com/articles/mar...ecensoring.htm

[dannysullivan]

I saw this earlier and frankly, it was confusing.

So if I understand this right, I could search on Yahoo recently for something like [charlie sheen 9/11] and find ordinary web page results. Not news results -- regular web search results. That seems to be what they are saying. And further, they're saying Google wasn't carrying these at all.

OK, I don't have a screenshot of what Yahoo was showing. I don't have any idea of the exact search terms they used. I just have their word that Google wasn't showing material.

OK, let's say I believe this. I can believe it, in the sense that some will remember that right after the latest SEO content, Greg Boser and others pointed out that Google was slow in picking up new pages. Hey, maybe they were doing that out of censorship. More likely, they were just lame.

I mean, of all the things Google's going to censor, they're worried about what Charlie Sheen thinks? Give me a break. If they had no web search results and Yahoo did, I chalk that up to their web search index being simply stale.

Now during the radio discussion, they "suddenly" gained 110,000 pages? So that search before brought up NO matches at all? Or no stories that Prison Planet thought were relevant. There's a difference. But why would it have changed? Gosh, maybe Matt Cutts was tuned into the show out of his major Charlie Sheen concern and pushed a magic button to inject the listings. Or perhaps they suddenly hit a diffferent, fresher data center.

But let's go back to the screenshots. The first shows me that yeah, the web search results don't seem to have any thing relevant to his comments though they do have 108,000 matches. Perhaps if I drilled deeper into the results, I would have found relevant pages. Shouldn't happen, but again, more likely Google's lame than on the protect Charlie bandwagon.

Of course, you can clearly see on that same screenshot that Google News is carrying a story on the issue. Hey, great censorship! Damn, we pulled things out of the web index but we forgot all about Google News. And if you clicked on that link, what did you get? I don't know, because we aren't shown. But if I click on the news results link, I currently get 28 different stories on the topic. Over at Yahoo (http://news.search.yahoo.com/news/se...een+9%2F11&c=), I get 15. Hey, I thought Yahoo was the place with thousands of matches. What happened, they suddenly dropped all of those?

Frankly, for all we know, Google News may have been more comprehensive than Yahoo on this story a few days ago. And since I'm more concerned about news search results -- since they are specifically supposed to be timely -- than web search, I'm still not buying the censorship push.

But let's take that last screenshot. It's a title search for the page that Google supposedly censored, because it didn't show up fast enough for the publication. OK, do this"
http://news.search.yahoo.com/search/...Story%22&x=wrt

Woah! Look, there's Yahoo censoring the page, 'cause I don't see it.

http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?F...F11%20Story%22
has MSN Search failing to get it in the top results.

http://www.ask.com/web?q=%22Actor%20...22&o=0&qsrc=61 is Ask failing to get the original page in the exact results.

http://www.ask.com/web?q=http%3A%2F%...htm&qsrc=1&o=0 is Ask not finding the page at all.

http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?F...liesh een.htm and http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=htt...t&cop=mss&tab= is MSN and Yahoo clearly having the original page in their indexes but apparently deciding to censor it by pushing it down when you search by title. Clearly they're protecting Charlie but failed to get outed as "censoring" anything.

To make it "crystal clear" as they do, the fact they didn't have a page ranking well in this case while they have in others within a few days doesn't necessarily mean some technician pushed some button. It can just as easily have been because they had their own server problems or Google had crawling issues. But heck, let's yell censorship and ensure we attract a lot of attention to ourselves plus ensure we get a priority crawl in the future.

[fulton savage]

Originally Posted by dannysullivan

Of course, you can clearly see on that same screenshot that Google News is carrying a story on the issue. Hey, great censorship!

I don't think anyone was saying that G news was slow at all. The censorship claims were made about the natural results.

I have the same questions as you have raised, but frankly I missed the boat on this, too. I read all the stories/links from prison planet and infowars and never had to search for the stuff I wanted about it.

I think that since it was only 2 or 3 days that we're talking about here its no big deal, but DrudgeReport linked to prison planet for about an hour then yanked the link with no developments or comments, so maybe the story blew up even though some people we're reluctant to let it?


edit: broken quote tag

[GoogleGuy]

I'm happy to chime in and debunk a little bit too. I've looked into this, and as near as I can tell, the main claim is that Google didn't index a specific page out on the web for three days. That may be true, but it doesn't mean that Google is somehow censoring or trying to hide information. As Danny points out, Google has no strong feelings either way on what Charlie Sheen thinks about 9/11.

Sometimes it takes a few days for information to show up in any web search engine. Why, back in my day (before May-ish 2003), it took search engines a month to update their index! At the risk of being a rascal, I'll point out that Wisenut didn't update their search engine for more than a year after September 11th. That is, you could search for [september 11] after 9/11/2002 and the #1 result on Wisenut was minutes for a cub scout meeting instead of anything about 9/11, if I recall correctly.

Does that mean Wisenut was trying to suppress info about 9/11 or pretend it never happened? No, of course not; they just hadn't updated their index. I take it as great progress that in 4-5 years, we've gone from "a search engine can be over a year out of date and people just accept that" to "it's been three days and you didn't index my story; Google must be part of a conspiracy."