[Pages on Google] …ranked by importance to the general public, against media interest….
1. Climategate: 28,400,000 – 2,930 = 9693
2. Afghanistan: 143,000,000 – 154,145 = 928
3. Obama: 202,000,000 – 252,583 = 800
4. Tiger Woods: 22,500,000 – 46,025 = 489
Related – those who have been following the side story of “Googlegate” are aware of the hijinks with their auto-suggest. It doesn’t end there, however – in recent hours they’ve carried out more purges than Stalin.
As you can see above, a couple of days ago there were over 28 million results for “Climategate”, today – just under half of that. In contrast, Bing’s count has been steadily rising, and currently stands at over 51 million.
Google is also infamous for penalizing the page rank of sites critical of leftist issues (this one included – my page rank was whacked back a couple of months ago, despite the fact that both incoming links and traffic were stable.). Watch for the same to happen to prominent blogs in the skeptic sphere.
Much as I am no fan of Microsoft I decided to abandon Google search and gmail. I don’t respect a search engine that decides what is important.
I probably shouldn’t mention it because people will just get mad at me and call me a lefty and there’s no margin in it anyway and I could be playing cribbage or working on tonight’s SDA Late Nite Radio show instead, but a number of the comments written above are foolish and they make their authors look silly. Both Bing and Google have had variable auto-suggest results on this evolving issue. Both Bing and Google have had variable page hit and count results on this evolving issue. Both Bing and Google have had varying success reconciling variant spellings of this evolving issue. For a while Google was ahead, then Bing. So more is better? Quantity trumps quality?
Sometimes some of you remind me of the little old lady who says that there are mice under the hood of her car because she hears squeaking noises from there that sound like mice. You have no idea how Bing and Google actually work. I have read some of what is available about the Google File System and about map-reduce (the latter of which I know quite a bit about from my work in Scheme and Lisp), and I can tell you that the overall effect of the kinds of algorithms in use in these huge-volume search engines is not a linear predictive model.
When you have tens of thousands of CPUs wandering around processing peta-bytes of data into millions of summary indicies, the relative values of various items will change due to the recent histories of the (virtual) paths the CPUs have been wandering. Again, it’s not linear: those engines don’t usually see things because they are happening, they see things because they have gotten around to reading about it in the data they relatively continually collect, but can only afford to summarize according to processing schedules.
Now, since for years people have been complaining about the underlying automated behaviour, the search engine folks have tried adding bells and whistles to make the operation seem more linear predictive. They do things like trying to make a list of bell-weather sources to watch for breaking developments. They try to add features for coping with rapidly changing hot-button issues, and to handle the associated abuse that invariably goes along with same.
Thus, when you see behaviour that is not linear predictive, it may simply be that the indexing CPUs are working on other stuff. It may be that something in the bells-and- whistles code is interacting badly with the generic automatic code. It may be that they are trying to cope with search engine abuse, such as spammers putting up millions of porn pages called climategate.
Google has been accused of being pro-lefty. Bing has been accused of being pro-Microsoft. While either may or may not turn out to be the case, if at some point in the future we do have data and code that, like the CRU code now does, shows malfeasance, until that happens all you have are conspiracy theories.
And so it is that I think that it is a less than optimal idea to make things up to castigate Google (or Bing, or that matter) while we are in the process of castigating the CRU for making things up.
re: selective auto-suggestions and sliding rankings; perhaps there is a mole or disgruntled google insider that will similarly spill the beans on whatsisname brin’s crew.
we can hope.
p.s. call me a leftard if you will , that way I can ‘out’ the namecaller by leaking the goods on the rabid right wing purists.
Can Tiger Woods save the endangered hotel skank?
Yes he can.
Vitruvius at 6:14 PM
you leftard you:-))
Roger that, GYM 😉
When Google leadership bashed Bush on privacy issues only to assume the position on the same issue for communist China, they became dead to me. Yahoo’s engine returns the most sensible items for me and Bing is used occasionally when I use the wrong search blank.
Hey, I just tried the Bing search and its 1 million 6 hundred thousand.
If it WAS 50 million, they have been up to even worse skullduggery than Google.