J-e-w-w-a-t-c-h.com, Act II coming up
I've been following the issue about the anti-semitic site and the high ranking it has on Google. Fox News ran a story on it today: Google in Middle of Anti-Semitic Flap (amusingly, my site traffic spiked through the roof the moment it hit the air, guess why :-). For a while, I was trying to figure out what was going on, but no harm done).
So far, a lobbying effort has gotten the site taken off its hosting company. I predict this is a sure prelude to "Act 2" of any censorship-style drama, where the site comes back with a new host and causes yet another wave of articles on the issue. You heard it here first.
As stated in one recent message dated April 19:
According to reports we've received, frustrated by their failure to shut us down through cyber-attacks, the censors began putting pressure on "Everyone's Internet" -- threatening to do severe damage to the economic interests of the firm and its clients if the 'offending' sites were not removed. So, we're moving to a new server -- and concurrently making plans to make our sites more nearly impregnable to both cyber-attacks -- and censorship -- in the future.
The efforts to shut down jewwatch.com are a matter of public record -- even Google has apologized (on its main search page[!], if you enter the word 'Jew') -- under this pressure, and the censors' efforts expanded when they discovered that nationalvanguard.org was truthfully covering the Jew Watch saga in its pages -- and was located at the same server facility.
Stay tuned ...
By Seth Finkelstein | posted in google | on April 20, 2004 11:59 PM (Infothought permalink) | Followups
Oddly enough, in the previous incarnation of this topic I posted a link to an essay, which contained towards the end criticism of Google. Within about a day, and probably because of its link to this page, it was highly ranked under "Behavioral Property" and several other searches.
Now I note that the search [zork.net google] pulls the page up, but searches like ["Behavioral Property" monetization"] or even ["Behavioral property" "Intellectual Property"], that is, the main topics of the essay, don't any more. In other words, you can find the page, but not via its content. It is as though the content has been "unindexed" without deleting the page per say, as it can still be retrieved by fractions of the URL.
Does Google actively screen for pages critical of it and filter them?