Posted on 11/28/2008 4:06:11 PM PST by Vincent Jappi
WORLD NET COVERS THE GOOGLE BAN ON ATLAS
Chelsea of World Net Daily has picked up on this outrage: "SANDBOXED"/ BLACKLISTED BY GOOGLE.
Check it out:
Google 'censoring' anti-Obama bloggers? Writer claims Internet giant banning stories that expose president-elect
Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs
Is Google censoring anti-Obama stories?
Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs claims the search engine giant has banned her groundbreaking articles about Obama – a technique many people refer to as "sandboxing."
"There was no warning, no notice, nothing," Geller told WND. "They have basically sandboxed me."
"Sandboxing" happens when Google strips a website's rankings from its search engine results. According to some theories, this happens to new websites when Google puts them into a holding area known as a "sandbox" until the site gains credibility.
However, Atlas Shrugs is not new, and Geller believes her stories have been intentionally suppressed by the Internet giant – especially ones about President-elect Obama. She said her exclusive stories about Obama's birth certificate that once received thousands of hits every day will not come up in Google word searches.
"I was in the top five search results before the story got legs," she said. "These stories drove 12,000 to 15,000 people to my site every day."
But now a November earnings report from shows her Google clicks and revenue flat lining since Nov. 20. Daily page impressions dropped from an average of 20,000 and 45,000 to single digits – overnight. Also, her Google images hits are slowed to only 4,720 since that day, while Yahoo and other search engines list them in the hundreds of thousands.
"The media gives blogs the silent treatment," she said. "The only thing we have is these searches. The Google word search is gone – all gone. When you are in my business, that's how you build readership."
On July 4, Geller featured a story about a board-certified forensic expert who declared Obama's online birth certificate a "forgery" and an "obvious fake." She attributes most of her problems with Google to that report.
"I think that it's the birth certificate story," Geller said. "All of the sudden, my numbers were down by 10,000."
She has also featured reports on Obama's support of Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga and cases of alleged campaign finance fraud involving his campaign. Geller believes Google is censoring her stories because it objects to their content.
"It's a freedom of speech issue," she said. "Who are they to decide what should be searched? They don't like what I'm running so they ban me?"
Geller said she has contacted Google three times, and the company said it has filed "requests for consideration" to put her stories back on Google's search pages.
"They want me to sit this out for six months," she said. "Are they kidding? Based on what?"
Geller said the top Google word searches used to be about Obama's birth certificate. But now she said the searches only return "a bunch of speculating and hearsay" to make the stories appear to be unfounded conspiracy theories.
She believes the censorship could have something to do with Google CEO Eric Schmidt's relationship with the president-elect. According to recent reports, Schmidt will soon be holding a position in the Obama administration.
Geller said she has hired a cyber-crime consulting firm to remove her articles from the search engine's "sandbox" and has asked her readership to help fight censorship with donations.
"Google cannot arbitrarily silence voices of freedom," she said. "Blogs are the last vestige of free speech."
UPDATE: The interesting timing is that it seems to correspond with the "Google Search Wiki"
Click here: The Liberty Sphere: Google Blacklists Geller's Atlas Shrugs
UPDATE: Yid with Lid: CENSORSHIP--GOOGLE CENSORING ATLAS SHRUGS FOR TELLING TRUTH ABOUT OBAMA
Google is not nearly as good as it was when it first started. It was so much better when it was not so political or commercialized.
98% of political donations from Google employees are to liberals.
He further said how hard they strived to be politically neutral.
What a joke!
Well the MSM considers themself politically neutral. Leftists idea of what politically neutral is somewhere between Nancy Pelosi and Bill Clinton.
"Dogpile" comes to mind as another type or search engine, but is not fully integrated with my web browser. I need to go to my bookmarks and then click on it for searches as opposed to right clicking or "two finger" pad click in order to "google search" the highlighted word.
Any other search engine suggestions?
> Any other search engine suggestions?
Good question.
Search wiki is a way for users to give feedback to Google about whether a search result is really appropriate for the search terms.
How much you want to bet that this "innovation" has put a loaded gun in the hands of Leftists who can mobilize a whole bunch of people to "down check" atlas and other sites?
In other words, it might NOT be Google directly, but people "google bombing" atlas.
yeah, but it’s still sh%tcanned overall and for the most common stuff like ‘obama birth certificate’ it doesn’t even show up.
Google is big enough to ruin companies now. They are a danger to the marketplace and the FTC ought to break them up already. When Microsoft reached this level of power, the DOJ went after them...
Looks like they DID!
Who's to stop them from censoring themselves? They are a private owned company.
See post #10.
I wonder what search terms people were using in Google to get to Atlas...two days ago I searched using "Obama birth certificate" --the term "forgery" should be pretty redundant for the search, and less used--and the Atlas site did not come up in the first 13 pages on Google, which is as far as I got. Atlas showed up on page 2 of Yahoo! and on page one on A9.
I just redid the search on Google and it doesn't show up on the first five pages (as far as I checked) while sites that had much less to do with the story are featured.
Who's to stop them from censoring themselves? They are a private owned company.
This is why the leftists are winning with that kind of logic.
Interesting, I didn’t know that about Google search Wiki. The same thing could happen at Free Republic.
I Googled “Obama’s birth certificate” and the 10th link was to Atlas Shrugs’ article regarding it.
Strange this...
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