Free Republic

I heard recently that there were Jewish people living in Libya. I decided to search for stories using a google news search "libya jewish". At the bottom of the search results Google linked to the following apology. Kinda tells you how awful internet news can be... An explanation of our search results: If you recently used Google to search for the word “Jew,” you may have seen results that were very disturbing. We assure you that the views expressed by the sites in your results are not in any way endorsed by Google. We’d like to explain why you’re seeing...

Reports of bias in Google results are coming in very fast recently. Microsoft has filed lawsuits alleging that Google favors its own websites. And conservative commentators have accused it of anti-freespeech bias for many years. Contrary to popular belief, Rush Limbaugh is usually very reserved in saying such things. He has often been quoted on his radio programme as saying that he is aware of the responsible position he has, and is thus considerate about what he says. But Rush directed some very harsh language at Google on Tuesday, noting that Google has developed an oddly close relationship with the...

Google has changed the rules on its serach engine to protect President Obama from the same sort of mockery it allowed of President Bush. For better or worse, Google's search engine has become the principal index for online information, giving the company tremendous opportunities to inflict bias on the nation's (and world's) information flow. Sadly, the company is demonstrating a willingness to slant leftward. During the Bush Administration, Google did nothing to prevent manipulation of its search algorithms so that one typed in "miserable failure", articles about President Bush appeared. But now that The One is president, the company has...

I just checked a long ignored yahoo email account of mine (not used in at least 6 months) and discovered hundreds of emails, the titles of which follow the same general format: [FreeRepublic] Pictures of young and Sexy College girls With all manner of descriptives after the [FreeRepublic] part. What gives? How is this happening? Any ideas?

John McCain is a massive, online activism campaign designed to make at least ten million non-partisan, poll-tested, on-message voter contacts that reveal the damning truth about John McCain entirely through mainstream news reports and McCain's own words. Through mass blogger participation and the use of embedded hyperlinks, Searching for John McCain will connect millions of curious, low-information swing voters to negative, mainstream news articles about John McCain without 99% of those voters even knowing that Searching for John McCain exists. It is the more sophisticated, and hopefully more effective, 2.0 version of the Googlebomb the Elections campaign which, with only...

"the+greatest+campaign+finance+scandal+in+American+history" "the greatest campaign finance scandal in American history" Now that this phrase has been published by a respected member of the MSM, and, as such, is now in the LexusNexis search database, it seems appropriate to associate that phrase with the person to whom it refers: Hillary Rodham Clinton. I received a ping from FReeper "Spirit of Allegiance" this morning which pointed to an article which featured our pal, "Dougfromupland." The article was in the San Francisco Chronicle's on line edition. Here is the introductory paragraph of the article about "the greatest campaign finance scandal in American history." In...

Google's decision to censor its search engine in China was bad for the company, its founders admitted yesterday. Google, launched in 1998 by two Stanford University dropouts, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, was accused of selling out and reneging on its "Don't be evil" motto when it launched in China in 2005. The company modified the version of its search engine in China to exclude controversial topics such as the Tiananmen Square massacre or the Falun Gong movement, provoking a backlash in its core western markets. Asked whether he regretted the decision, Mr Brin admitted yesterday: "On a business level,...

Google has finally had it with Googlebombing, the act of hundreds of Internet users linking up specific words with certain web sites in order to produce a desired (and usually comical) search result. The company announced today via its corporate blog that they have finally altered their search engine algorithm to minimize the impact of Googlebombs by improving the way they analyze link structures on web sites. Google's previous stance on this type of Internet pranking was just that—it was a prank and that they didn't want to get involved in manually altering otherwise-harmless antics on the web. Also called...

October 26, 2006 A New Campaign Tactic: Manipulating Google Data By TOM ZELLER Jr. If things go as planned for liberal bloggers in the next few weeks, searching Google for “Jon Kyl,” the Republican senator from Arizona now running for re-election, will produce high among the returns a link to an April 13 article from The Phoenix New Times, an alternative weekly.Mr. Kyl “has spent his time in Washington kowtowing to the Bush administration and the radical right,” the article suggests, “very often to the detriment of Arizonans.”Searching Google for “Peter King,” the Republican congressman from Long Island, would bring...

Democratic Web loggers are so upset by that ABC 9/11 movie that they've planned an Internet attack — known as a Google Bomb — to make sure their view of the film dominates the Web. Activists on Democratic-Underground.com have urged every Democratic blogger to post identical entries after the movie airs, all featuring the film's title, so that any Internet search for the movie will turn up a liberal blog highlighting what they say are multiple inaccuracies in the film. If the plan works, bloggers say they'll be prepared to utilize the technique "at every turn" between now and November.

Growing Unrest in Venezuela – (But No Film at 11) We don’t see or hear much about Venezuela in the news – unless “outspoken” Presidente Hugo Chavez happens to be bashing our President ,and/or ranting about his need to defend against imminent attack by the dreaded norteamericanos. Sample here from the (UK) Daily Telegraph: http://www.portal.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=OLL0GJ4QZJZCTQFIQMFCFGGAVCBQYIV0?xml=/news/2006/03/04/wvenez04.xml Such announcements are often made in the presence of fatuous American admirers – Harry Belafonte , Cindy Sheehan ,and assorted pols and academics – and they receive full, undivided media attention. ( Hey ! Anyone who bashes “Dubya” can’t be all bad !) There is...

While trying to find a nativity image for my last post before Christmas, I did an search for "baby jesus" on Google. This is the result. Notice that the top search result is for a sex toy that mocks Jesus. Other results on this search results page have more link traffic. A quick review of page's code shows no HTML meta information that should give it a favorable ranking. The page itself has a raw relevance ranking (search word divided by total words) of less than five percent. The only conclusion I can draw is that this page position ranking...

On December 9th, 2003 we asked you to make a difference, and the Glenn Beck audience responded. On that date we presented our listeners with one very important goal: make Michael "Miserable Failure" Moore come up first when people do a search for "Miserable Failure" on the Google search engine. While he still doesn't take the top spot as of this writing, Michael Moore has quickly risen through the Google rankings and now shows up as #2 on the list. So we ask you again to redouble your efforts and help make Michael Moore the biggest "Miserable Failure" of all....

On December 9th, 2003 we asked you to make a difference, and the Glenn Beck audience responded. On that date we presented our listeners with one very important goal: make Michael "Miserable Failure" Moore come up first when people do a search for "Miserable Failure" on the Google search engine. While he still doesn't take the top spot as of this writing, Michael Moore has quickly risen through the Google rankings and now shows up as #2 on the list. So we ask you again to redouble your efforts and help make Michael Moore the biggest "Miserable Failure" of all....