Banned by Google

Is this censorship of selective amnesia on the part of Google?

I google search for a few of the headlines from ablemesh.co.uk and find that Google finds less than a third of them. I try searching on a sentence from each page. Same deal. No show.

Table: Today (29 June 08), Google doesn't show the crossed pages if you search on their headline or body text content.

I don't have an answer for this.

I sent an email to Google's security team. As Google prides itself on its search capability, I imagined it might be disturbed to learn of its failure to deliver the current best match for my searches.*1

But a little further reading suggests that the Google search engine already displays selective amnesia in China. The Chinese government made it a condition of allowing Google to operate in its territory.

So, how long before Google starts to demonstrate selective amnesia in what it serves up for us in the UK and USA?

How soon is now?*2

Ends | 29 June 2008 | The Leg

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Notes:

*1 Google has become a giant. It wields phenomenal power over what information and ideas we encounter. A great majority of web searches are now performed using Google. At least 60% of traffic coming to the ablemesh site to date has been coming via Google searches.

*2 The above crossed pages were not available from within the index on the day of writing, but had been available from the index up to June 2008 (I frequently check various article's Google rankings so I can say this with some certainty). For example, the Iran Attack article ranked 1st and 2nd in a Google search on the headline content on 8 June. I am not imagining this. I wrote it down. On 26 May it had ranked 2nd and 4th. Today (29 June)... it has been wiped from the index. Only the YouTube version shows up in a search - that's to say, the version without credible supporting references. A Yahoo search still delivers most of these documents. I'm switching to Yahoo!

Stop Press. Some Articles Restored. At 1 Sep 2008, 23 of 35 articles are now recognised by the Google index, following submission of a site map on 7 Jul 2008.

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