Google this week
Google cranks up the Consensus Engine The Register hat tip N47
By Andrew Orlowski • Get more from this author
Google this week admitted that its staff will pick and choose what appears in its search results. It's a historic statement - and nobody has yet grasped its significance.
THEY PICK AND CHOOSE?
Not so very long ago, Google disclaimed responsibility for its search results by explaining that these were chosen by a computer algorithm. The disclaimer lives on at Google News, where we are assured that:
The selection and placement of stories on this page were determined automatically by a computer program. A few years ago, Google's apparently unimpeachable objectivity got some people very excited, and technology utopians began to herald Google as the conduit for a new form of democracy. Google was only too pleased to encourage this view. It explained that its algorithm "relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. "
That Google was impartial was one of the articles of faith. For if Google was ever to be found to be applying subjective human judgment directly on the process, it would be akin to the voting machines being rigged.
For these soothsayers of the Hive Mind, the years ahead looked prosperous. As blog-aware marketing and media consultants, they saw a lucrative future in explaining the New Emergent World Order to the uninitiated. (That part has come true - Web 2.0 "gurus" now advise large media companies).
It wasn't surprising, then, that when five years ago I described how a small, self-selected number of people could rig Google's search results, the reaction from the people doing the rigging was violently antagonistic. Who lifted that rock? they cried.
But what was once Googlewashing by a select few now has Google's active participation.
Pamela comments: Now that Hussein is in the White House, Google (a chief fundraiser and potential member of O's administration) wants to control the news on their man.
I never saw this kind of news suppression under Bush. You could say anything, BushChimpHitler, and get away with it.
Entering the dark age ....
15 comments:
And YouTube is owned by Google. My channel CommonSenseAnon was deleted without any warning. There was nothing offensive there, but there was a news report featuring the court case re Husein Obama's birth cert.
Seems to me that this story is 100% right.
Ray,
We will soon be having another UK blogger joining IBA who also had his blog deleted.
I have not googled anything for over 6 months. I use Yahoo. I do use YouTube a little. I think Google is not as good as Yahoo when looking for stuff. Can't find it w/Google? It's usually in the first 5 searches at Yahoo. Looks like I made a good decision. Except this is a Google account. YIKES!!
Ray Boyd,
I'm beginning to be ashamed of being a Google blogger. Weather or not your YouTube page had anything on it that was offensive is irrelevant. Just about everything is offensive to someone.
As the world system begins to crack down on this brief period of internet freedom we have been enjoying, let's make sure we have alternate ways of staying in touch and coordinated with each other. If it seems hard to track the whereabouts and next attack by the various mujahideen in the mountains of Afghanistan, it will be even harder to track us down once they've banished us from the internet. They will have driven us from the relatively "safe" cyber-world and into the "real" world, where there will be no safety for them as well as for us.
This is a little off topic
But I just stumbled upon this
At any rate, the magistrates' offices were crowded yesterday, since - apart from those labeled as "rioters" & "hooded ones" - about 30 immigrants among those arrested during the unrest, most of them Iraqis, were in those offices for the crimes of "gang formation" & "larcenies."
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/12/415227.html
shiva,
Interesting article.
posted by Pastorius
Entering the dark age ....
Is Blogger safe ?
Are any of the other blogs such as Wordpress safe, or are tey going to follow the same path as google ?
My advice is to get every thing downloaded to hard disk. This way you dont lose every thing. My blog was worth 7000 hours of dedicated hard work, luckily I saved it.
A few years ago I had people laughing at me when I mentionrd youtube where censoring anti-islam stuff.
What really made it clear that YouTube was censoring was when they censored Michelle Malkin's video reporting that they were censoring.
Romanos and Shiva,
You too make good points.
We ought to do both things,
1) save everything to disc, so we can restart our blogs if they are taken down
2) start emails lists with which we pass around the information we report on.
Romanos,
Shiva,
Pastorius,
Those are good ideas. Its better to be safe than sorry. I used to write stories about the cities I made playing with Simcity Societies and would post them on their webpage. Then they took their story section down, and you can't find them anymore. Now if that can happen with something so minor, why not do all we can to protect something as important as this?
I've been thinking for most of this year that we could well lose the Internet.
Some of us may be using other search engines. But this fact remains: Google is the one that "the public" uses. Some are not tech savvy enough to try another search engine if Google doesn't show results for what the searchers are looking for.
Saving everything to disc won't to the trick for dissemination to those who don't already have contact. Sorry.
Warren knows how to back up a blog with some free tool on the web.
Always On Watch
My main concern is that blogger starts to shut down blogs
In my case I down-loaded every thing a few weeks before blogger blocked me.
The reason why I decided to download was because Photobucket had banned me, where as I lost quite a lot of images, which now no longer exist.
So I strongly advise every body to back up their blogs or risk losing every thing.
Do what I do; host your blog yourself AND keep another identical version on Wordpress.com
IMO Wordpress.com is not part of a corporate body that will be influenced by PC. The import/export function works well and enables you to keep both blogs syncronised.
Here are both blogs, spot the difference:
http://commonsenseagainstislam.wordpress.com
http://commonsenseagainstislam.websanon.com
websanon.com is my own domain and my privacy is guaranteed by two levels of anonymity
Ray Boyd said.
I was advised more than a year ago to transfer/export to Wordpress by another blogger, foolishly I did not listen.
Apparently if you transfer the links still function, and will still come up on the search engines.
I have yet not gotten around to re-doing my blog on word press as I was kind of burnt out after being blocked both by blogger and photobucket
Maybe I should, as a lot of my old material is to graphic to be here.
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