Google No More Natural Search?

[Discovery]

Google's CEO is an open supporter of Barack Obama and now a close partner in many Government based programs. Mapping and satellite partnerships being one and health records being another.

So I searched for Barack this morning and mistyped his name.

Barack Aboma
Google presented an interesting result.
It not only offered me the correct spelling of his name which makes sense, but gave 2 premium listings for their corrected search term. Below those two listings they provide normal search results for the actual query used. Clearly, they evaluated this specific search and felt compelled to make an editorial change and provide a "clear result". This made me think, where does the editorial review and edit start and stop? People? Places? Companies? Here is the screen shot.


Seeing this I thought I would see if the big G kept this practice even; Search for George Busch and you get the following results:


So what is this all about? Obama who Google endorses has all negative pictures, negative sites and negative videos completely removed and his self promoting website put in their place while at the same time George Busch has every single nasty photo, nasty attack site and video presented with NO alterations by Google's editors to direct searchers to what they deem a more relevant site?

Are you concerned about Google's tinkering with search results?
I don't mind a bit of editorial review when it comes to our president - ALL deserve respect, including our new president. But why pick and choose? where does this stop? Who do they provide this review for? They do it for Barny Frank, but not Dick Cheny.

What other results does Google feel compelled to alter?

Should they alter the results at all?
Should they provide a way for us to turn off their editorial results and only give us raw results?

In history most powerful entities in a country have always been the media outlets. If you control the media or the main point of communications with the public you have a great deal of power. You can control mass opinion and behavior. If Google is the media source of the new age, can tinkering like this be their downfall?

Discovery

[SEM&YellowPageGuru]

Great post..... It is apparant that Google is displaying its fondness of the democratic party leader. Remember when you typed in George Bush and the first thing that came up was the word "loser"?

[Discovery]

Agreed Yellow page. But to be clear I would be just as concerned had I seen positive results skewed towards a conservative leader. It is the favoritism I am concerned about not who they are favoring.

The concept of Google editing their natural results seems dangerous and puts them on a slippery slope to chaos.

Discovery

[SEM&YellowPageGuru]

What do you expect from a corporation..... just as bad as lobbyists in my opinion... the favortism is obvious. If it were the other direction I would still see the flaw in this type of corporate direction/promotion.

Google's view on the subject:

Google "google bomb"

What google has said about it:

People have asked about how we feel about Googlebombs, and we have talked about them in the past. Because these pranks are normally for phrases that are well off the beaten path, they haven’t been a very high priority for us. But over time, we’ve seen more people assume that they are Google’s opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Googlebombed queries. That’s not true, and it seemed like it was worth trying to correct that misperception. So a few of us who work here got together and came up with an algorithm that minimizes the impact of many Googlebombs.

[johninbrooklyn]

I just did the same search for a variety of politicians - on the right and left - and found the usual wikipedia and news articles the same for everyone. I'm guessing that someone that does a search for a politician is favorable to that politician and therefore the natural trend is for favorable articles to bubble up in natural search. There are obvious exceptions. I just did a search on Tom Daschle and 1/2 the SERP was related to his most recent issues with not paying taxes on getting a free car. I think you're reading too much into your own biases.