Astute readers have brought some virtual outrage to our attention in the last few days, which we’re passing on here, in hopes it will be of help to you in making decisions about virtual privacy and safety, and as yet more evidence that the practice of censoring ‘inconvenient’ truth is alive and well right here in the good ol’ USofA. These readers reported that an internet search for 911truth.org, using Google’s search engine, no longer finds 911truth.org in the results!
Intrepid researchers that we are, we tried this for ourselves and, indeed, they’re right! Go ahead…try it. Enter “911truth.org” in a Google search bar and you’ll find, currently, the first entry in response is some unheard of site based in the country Nauru. (Nauru?, we asked ourselves, wondering how we could possibly have missed that in geography class. Wikipedia helped with that oversight. Ah, but, of course! It’s that 8.1 square mile phosphate rock island in Micronesia, whose government “has resorted to unusual measures to obtain income.” Briefly a tax haven and money laundering center, Nauru now houses a detention center for Australian asylum seekers.) Well, then–that explains it, eh?
So then, the site with the greatest number of hits which most closely matches the search string “911truth.org” is … not … 911truth.org? In fact, the main (index) page of 911truth.org isn’t even in the list generated by a Google search for ‘911truth.org’! A page from our site linking to the Chicago conference we hosted in June 2006 shows up. Meaning more viewers are looking at last year’s conference announcement than the current front page of 911truth.org? Not so with other search engines, such as Ask, AltaVista and Yahoo… as one would expect, the first hit for this search is–surprise–911truth.org.
Is some technical code gobbledygook blocking our site, to keep it from showing up at Google, we wondered? Not according to the search engine optimization professional we asked.
Has readership at 911truth.org waned to the point that we don’t have enough traffic to even show up in a search on our own name? Well, according to Alexa.com, which issues “traffic ranks” for websites, (based on historical traffic data), 911truth.org’s rank is 118,306 vs. 2,273,950 for that other site… Lower numbers mean more traffic, so how is it we don’t show up at Google?! More puzzling, Alexa reports that the “percent of global Internet users who visit this site: increased 29% in last 3 months.” Doesn’t seem there was a sudden shift from the truth to anti-truth from these data.
So what’s the problem? It seems absolutely clear Google has purposefully removed 911truth.org from their search engine. Is this the same Google whose mission statement includes the goal “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Uhm, maybe only sort of universally accessible?
On September 6, 2007, Privacy International published results of internet privacy rankings, based on six months of investigation. “A Race to the Bottom — Privacy Rankings of Internet Service Companies” reports Google to be in last place, meaning the worst in terms of privacy issues, due to “numerous deficiencies and hostilities.”
“[t]hroughout our research we have found numerous deficiencies and hostilities in Google’s approach to privacy that go well beyond those of other organizations. While a number of companies share some of these negative elements, none comes close to achieving status as an endemic threat to privacy. This is in part due to the diversity and specificity of Google’s product range and the ability of the company to share extracted data between these tools, and in part it is due to Google’s market dominance and the sheer size of its user base. Google’s status in the ranking is also due to its aggressive use of invasive or potentially invasive technologies and techniques.
Furthermore, a search of “Google privacy concerns” will turn up much more information that should be of concern to internet users everywhere.
May we simply offer a recommendation to readers, based on what’s become more evident in terms of life with Google? We think it’s clearly time to find a different way of living in the virtual information world–A way that doesn’t include Google in your sphere of friends.
Related articles: 100% Proof Google is Keeping Conspiracy Sites Down: “Link Relevance” Suppressed on Alternative Media by Lucus Drador, 08/13/07; and MySpace Censors Anti-War Websites: Prison Planet blocked as the model for government regulated Internet 2 gets a dry run, by Paul Joseph Watson, September 25, 2007 (Ed. We’re told Myspace is redirecting 911truth.org links, as well, but haven’t documented this yet.)
