| Thursday, December 3, 2009 |
07:41 - GO ABOUT YOUR BUSINESS CITIZEN
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I gotta say, this is pretty funny. Or at least that's what I tell myself.
That's the top hit right now if you start typing "climategate" into Google Suggest (or any embedded widget thereof). Notice that nobody in the media or blogosphere or anywhere spells it with a space; yet that's still the most popular search term beginning with "climate". And "climategate", the far more common spelling, is conspicuously absent from the suggested results.
Yesterday, "climate-gate" showed up in the top few results after just typing "climate"; but "climategate" itself was nowhere to be seen, even if you kept typing the "g" "a" "t" part.
And now even "climate-gate" has been extirpated; type "climate-g" and all you get suggested is "climate-graphs.co.uk". How long until they zap "climate gate scandal" too? And after that, what variant will be the next most commonly searched climate-related term on the Internet? "Climategaet"? "Climate::Gate"? "Climb it gate"?
I'd love to hear Google explain this on technological/load-management grounds. I mean, hell, why not just filter out the actual search results, like when people in China try to search for "Tiananmen Square"? Or would people, like, notice that too easily?
See also this post at WUWT, which got me keeping an eye on this.
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Brian Tiemann
