Is Google A Dangerous Monopoly?

I hadn't planned on mentioning this here, not now, anyway - thinking I might close RWV soon and just open another site, or take a break. But then HotAir linked this piece you should read. Some of you may realize I have an underlying url on typepad featuring the word conservative.

Something frighteningly ominous has been happening on the Internet lately: Google, without any prior explanation or notice, has been terminating its News relationship with conservative e-zines and web journals.

RWV wasn't indexed by Google News, just by Google Web - as you can see here, they completely dropped me and all my archives from Google about a month ago.

I can't even get an answer, they don't respond. And given the amount of traffic flow they direct over the Internet, I am seriously starting to wonder if any one company should have that much power over information flow without any responsibility to explain their reasoning behind including some sources while excluding others.

You want to talk Big Brother, given Google's success, right now on the Internet they are it. You don't think my base url carnivorous conservative had anything to do with my situation, do ya? I thought maybe it was an advertiser, so I canceled it - still, Google won't respond after numerous attempts.

At the very least given their success and the amount of information they control, along with their obvious willingness to quash it if they disagree, you'd think at the very least they should have some obligation to keep the public informed and treat people decently. Clearly they don't and feel no real obligation to based on my experience.

I deleted thousands of comments thinking perhaps a link or something else was in there - still no word from Google. You can go to Google itself and see any number of sites they simply dropped from their search engine with no explanation whatsoever.

But some troubling patterns might be beginning to emerge. Read the potential political ramifications of Google's censorship. And read it all.

Comments

[musicgirlms]

More on Google .... did you know that if you type in the word "Failure" on the Google home page, and then click the "I'm Feeling Lucky" option, it takes you to a bio of George W. Bush??? I heard about that awhile back and thought some hackers must have encoded that; however, it has been awhile since I first heard of that, and it still happens. That really made me wonder about the possible liberal leanings of Google, and it bothered me that this has allowed to remain this way.

[Skyboxx]

Dan,

Some of us in Blogsphere had indicated that you were missing from Google for about 3 weeks ago.

Google has showed its agenda with not cooperating with the Government, which it assumes GW Bush has directed it to attach Google for its work with foreign governments. For the record, that's why Bill Gates has hinted that MS will now look at challenging Google for Search Engine superiority. I think we need some competition to keep things balanced

[> ~ WabbiSabbi ~]

What is a good alternative? It is scary that Google seeks to sensor. I wonder just who profits from Google?

[Erik]

The owner of Google is known to be a very heavy handed liberal who donated many millions to the John Kerry campaign.

[Mr. K.]

Funny how most Republicans are supporters of the free market except when they're on the wrong end of the billionare stick. Remember this feeling, it's what many Democrats feel when they switch on Fox News.

[Dan]

Remember this feeling, it's what many Democrats feel when they switch on Fox News.

As usual, liberal in every sense except intelligence. Fox is nothing compared to the big three. The situations aren't even remotely comparable. But you'd need reason to be able to figure that out.

[lurking]

Do a search like this: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=riehl+world+view and this shows up. Riehl World ViewRiehl World View ... Unlike many nations, Americans can travel around the world and, ... And as reward for what many Americans view as President Bush's ...
www.carnivorousconservative.typepad.com/ - 141k - Cached - Similar pages

So I'm pretty sure that means you are still in their database. ?

[Mr. K.]

It's a safe bet that the people who work at Google are more intelligent that you, Dan.

[Dan]

No, they are finding RWV because it is text on other pages, and other blogs, including a few typepad pages. Trust me, they dropped them from the index. The site link in my post confirms it.

[Dan]

It's a safe bet

nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah. - Geesh, have you nothing of substance to contribute? Your point was shot down and you can't handle it so you go ad hominem with nothing to back it up. Big surprise. Don't you have a rally or a folk concert to attend?

[Scott Lawton]

In a quick check, it appears that carnivorousconservative.typepad.com and rieldworldview.com have identical contents. Google recently did some work on removing "duplicates', and only indexing one. I would guess a search on "canonical URL" and/or "big daddy" (the internal name of the release) and/or Matt Cutts will have some more details.

If you want rieldworldview.com to be the URL going forward, one solution might be to put a 301 permanent redirect at carnivorousconservative.typepad.com, (But, I'm not an expert here so I may have that wrong.)

FWIW, I've heard lots of complaints (and seen several misunderstandings) but seen no hard EVIDENCE of Google's political bias. But, even if they tilt left, please don't call the government in to "help". That will always end badly.

(As for the comment on "failure" leading to George Bush: Google's algorithms give weight to links, and lots of people gamed the system so that the first result leads to Bush. I'll bet there are lots of similar "Google hacks", and it doesn't strike me as so completely out of line that they should special case it. It's not like "failure" is an everyday search term, or an important search term.)

[Scott Lawton]

Oops; I forgot to mention: your "you can see here" link has an error; you have to include the .com. (e.g. site:cnn finds nothing; site:cnn.com works)

[Dan]

Oops; I forgot to mention: your "you can see here" link has an error; you have to include the .com. (e.g. site:cnn finds nothing; site:cnn.com works)

Thanks. But that doesn't change the results for my site. ALl of my RWV pages were indexed - CC has eight. And that's a typepad url I have no control over.

As it's always been that way, it still wouldn't explain their dropping RWV and 4-5,000 pages of indexed content.

[c]

It is nothing new:
I understand that IBM did this in 70s
Microsoft in 90s
and now its google's turn.

Also all the other billionaires are on Republican side, let one remain on the liberal side please....

[mantis]

Check your robots.txt file for riehlworldview.com

[Kin]

site:carnivorousconservative.typepad.com
Works just fine, it returns all the Riehl World View pages.

[Libby]

Um, before we get all fired up about censorship, if you google riehl world view, which is customary format a regular user would likely use, you still dominate the first three pages at least and it returne 450,000+ hits.

A little tempest in a teapot here? I would defend you if this was true, but it hardly seems like banishment to me.

[James Joyner]

Libby: No, no links to this site turn up in a Google search. What shows up is thousands of OTHER SITES that make reference to it. That, incidentially, should give RWV a rather high Google ranking.

Interestingly, the site still has a GR of 5, which is a little on the low side for an established blog (my "Gone Hollywood" site is a 5 and has little linkage, as it's new). OTB is a 7.

http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php

[Mild Bill]

I'm not sure what the hubbub is about. Like Libby, I find that a Google search for "riehl world view" turns up this page as hit #1. Not a reference to this page, but this very page itself.

[Libby]

No that's not true James, when I google it. If I google riehl world view, there's a direct link to this blog twice on page one. You're number one hit and again at seven or eight. If I google my own two blogs, both of which are rather left of moderate, using the format you linked to, "site:blogname", I get the same no result as you did. I have to use the blogspot suffix to get results.

Also you have a lot more links than I do when you google just the blog name. I'm a total technodope and granted you have a much bigger blog presence than I do, but I would think if this was some kind plot to censor right wing blogs, they would have removed all references to you.

Forgive me for being dense but I just don't see the censorship outside of being dropped from the news crawlers and that was allegedly based on complaints. I haven't read your posts on the Islam and terrorism but I have read some posts on some of the other blogs that were dropped and frankly I can see the basis for them. I have a high tolerance for hotheaded rhetoric and I found some of it disturbingly hateful. Not that I would complain, but I can understand why some people would.

[Dan]

No that's not true James

Libby, you're totally missing it. You need to look at the urls underneath those links that come up. Not one of them is riehlworldview, which a month ago would have filled the top page, or more. They aren't indexed. Just put site:riehlworldview.com in Google and you'll see. Then use another url of a site that is indexed. site:google.com They index themselves to the tune of over 64 Million pages.

[Daniel Medley]

My site was removed from Google's index as well without warning. After several e-mails they informed me that it was because of the kind of advertizing that I do which I find odd.

The more that Google arbitrarily de-lists sites, the less relevant it becomes. The less relevant it becomes, the less people will use it.

[Bob England]

This looks like an issue of duplicate information over domains. I searched for carnivorous conservative and the typepad site was up with exactly the same info. Google seems to be choosing the typepad domain over the personal domain since >> http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=site%3Acarnivorousconservative.typepad.com&btnG=Search << seems to work. They are probably doing this because there have been problems for search engines with splogs ripping off stories from real blogs. In this case, both blogs have identical data. This could be solved if six apart made it possible to ditch the typepad domain for those who have their own domains.

[Libby]

I did look at the URLs Dan and when I did the search, the number one hit and the number seven hit were directly to this site, via this URL. I did check that carefully. I'm a technodope, not an idiot. If Google is indeed censoring based on content, I would find that of grave concern even though I disagree vehemently with the position most of the allegedly banned blogs have taken on the Islam issue. I'm a big defender of the First Amendment and I certainly don't want anyone to be shut down. This all harks to my concerns about internet neutrality in general.

I'm sorry to say, this is only about the third time I've visited this blog so I'm not that familiar with your work but I've been hearing Google has "banned" other right wing blogs I frequent more often, some allegedly for content and some for their advertising which I understand has more to do with the source of the ads than the content of the advertising.

I don't understand how indexing works, I don't even understand how TTLB works, but I'll be damned if I can find any evidence of anyone being "banned" from Google. If I google you and I find your URL, how can that be construed as de-listed or struck from the index?

If people are being dropped from the News crawler, I don't think that constitutes censorship since they were deliberately added to the crawl in the first place but if they are indeed being delisted altogether, I'm willing to take what action I can to bring attention to it and get it remedied.

I'd note in passing that Google in general seems to tailor the search results according to one's search history. I noticed that years ago, when the same query would return different results at the law firm than it at home only a few hours later.

I don't know, maybe I'm just too computer illiterate to get it, but I sure would like to understand the problem.

[lurking]

"The more that Google arbitrarily de-lists sites, the less relevant it becomes. The less relevant it becomes, the less people will use it."

Well said.

I'm *hoping* that it was dropped because they thought rwv and cc were mirror sites - that would be a misunderstanding that should be easily fixed. Dropping it for the type of ads or the kind of content is something else.

This is a very interesting thread.

[Libby]

Well, I'm completely confused. I just googled to get here on a different computer in a different location but I see in a later post at the top that google admits de-indexing this blog.

As far as being de-listed on account of having the wrong ads, I've seen no evidence that you still can't access those blogs through google either.

[Scott Lawton]

Since these posts get indexed by search engines and such:

I posted the likely explanation on the followup post: there are subdomains such as education.riehlworldview.com filled with ads. I believe that's enough to get pulled from the Google index. So, it had nothing to do with politics.

Libby: as for different results at different times or from different computers: Google has more than one data center. Their index is so large that it's basically impossible to keep every data center 100% in sync. So, you may have gotten some "old" results. (They also experiment with things at certain data centers or perhaps random or targetted audiences, filter by country, and various other details that explain some differences.

[Dan]

I posted the likely explanation on the followup post:

I saw it and responded. I killed those links a month ago and have also looked into the subdomain issue. They didnt benefit me in anyway except as paid ads, which I stopped when the problem developed and informed Google at the time. Why in the hell can't they simply communicate?

[BelchSpeak]

Is Google Planning to Eavesdrop on Americans?

Dan, I was noting some interesting business trends with Google, and I
think that they plan on listening to what Americans play on their
computers and then delivering advertising based on that content.

Thought you might be interested....
http://www.belch.com/~blog/2006/05/26/dell-to-ship-google-search/

[derek]

typing in failure does bring up a W. bio, but it also brings up michael moores homepage.