BP buys Google, Yahoo search words to keep people away from real news on Gulf oil spill disaster

Examiner ^ | 6/7/2010 | Maryann Tobin

[mojitojoe]

In their most tenacious effort to control the ‘spin’ on the worst oil spill disaster in the history, BP has purchased top internet search engine words so they can re-direct people away from real news on the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe.

BP spokesman Toby Odone confirmed to ABC News that the oil giant had in fact bought internet search terms. So now when someone searches the words ‘oil spill’, on the internet, the top link will re-direct them to BP’s official company website.

This would not be the first time that BP has tried to control information to protect the company’s public image.

Shortly after the Deepwater Horizon exploded on April 20, 2010, BP executives quickly underestimated the size of the disastrous oil spill. Some suggest they did it to avoid costly EPA per-gallon spill fines. The less oil spilled, the lower the fines.

A month into the spill, the public learned through independent science, that the spill was in fact a million gallon a day gusher. BP got caught in their own lie when the used a syphon pipe in one of the broken riser pipes and proudly proclaimed that they were capturing 5,000 barrels of oil a day. With the oil obviously still gushing, they had to up their spill rate to explain the reported discrepancy in their earlier estimates.

[null and void]

No surprise. I watched in horror as google “disappear” half a million hits on image searches for ‘obama birth certificate’ in mid-July 2008.

They have long since declared their allegiance to the truth.

[Larousse2]

Google scrubs anything the admn doesn't want reported.

A proper flip-flop: Obama bans new offshore drilling until cause of Gulf of Mexico oil rig disaster is known. The ban should be permanent

[cynwoody]

The story is garbage. It implies that Google is allowing BP to bribe it to manipulate its search results. However, all Google is doing is running its standard business model, namely to get well paid to provide advertising precisely targeted based on search terms. Somebody's got to pay to keep those servers running. It might as well be BP.

Google's oil spill SERP does have a link to www.BP.com/OilSpillNews at the top, but it is clearly labeled as a sponsored link, not a search result.

[Larousse2]

Dems intend to repackage cap and trade in 'BP Spill Bill" so "it will be hard to oppose the Kerry-Lieberman Climate Bill

[socialism_stinX]

"If there's ever been a corporatist criminal that ought to be banned from the U.S, it's BP."

Sounds like a good plan to me, but it going to take a new administration in 2013 to make that happen.