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?
*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.
Net Neutrality Emergency Broadcast (Apr 2008): Follows magazine interview
in which a Virgin Media CEO
was explicit about the possibility of non-commercial content being
pushed into the Virgin internet slow lane... (effectively reducing access
to it).