For a while I’ve been noticing a distinct lack of very high profile sceptic blogs appearing in Google News feeds and some quite ridiculously low rating warmist blogs appearing as “news”. We all know that there have been isolated instances of bias, but now this effect is so great that I cannot ignore it.
Therefore I cannot continue categorising Google as being impartial on uClimate.com as their searches are now clearly and unequivocally biased toward “warmist”.
Note: This makes the decline in the number of warmist news stories on google all the more spectacular! Because they are declining relative to sceptic ones despite the policy of bias by Google.
Addendum
Just realised that if Google are so biased that I must classify them as “alarmists”, it would be unethical to use them as a search engine or to carry their ads – which involves a lot of work for me and probably a loss of the small bit of money I get in from ads.
However initial searching suggests the following:
- As a toolbar: Yahoo search
- As a home page: http://www.webcrawler.com/
- For ads Bing ads
I’m not very happy to have to be using Micro$oft, because it gained much of its wealth from useless software which it forced on consumers at great expense by creating a monopoly.
However, whereas Micro$oft were profiteers, Google are both profiteering AND trying to force a political agenda which has removed some types of websites almost completely from its searches. So it is de facto one of the biggest threats to free speech & liberty.
Yes, Mike, and how they censored “climategate” searches in 2009
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/websearch/kF8UQ7ewZWQ/75aTY749FeUJ
Part of the problem is that sceptics don’t reference each other as much as they should. The blog roll is well and good but isn’t updated often enough. Much though I loath it, Twitter links advertising each other’s articles would help. In the run up to Paris we should bump sceptic sites as much as we can.
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2015/6/22/its-always-the-silly-season-for-the-green-journo.html
By the way, uClimate is great but gives even publicity to both sides.
It’s not that. There has been a very dramatic change in the ease by which I can find older articles on sceptic sites.
When it first happened I thought I had lost my touch as I found I was incapable of finding old articles which used to be easy to find.
It is intentionally neutral. But because I’ve been monitoring the google news feeds with this encyclical, it’s become patently obvious that Google no longer carry any Sceptic blogs.
Indeed, I’m now having problems finding articles on my own site even though I know the title and there’s only one Scottish Sceptic.
It’s not just a boycott – it’s also that they are no longer that good.
There has been much muttering about Google and its relationship with paying sites. Maybe the EU will sort them ;-P Unfortunately it doesn’t mean the public will abandon Google, at least in the short term.
But what I mentioned also applies. Due to the dominance of the big boys, I’m surprised sceptics ever got a look in. You’ll have noticed how places like the Daily Mail will re-issue the same pages every few hours so that it stays the top of the search list. What sceptics need to ensure is that every site links to the rest of our network so that interested people can find what they’re looking for once they find a way to any part of the group. Also, most sceptic sites are terrible at indexing their own sites for reference and the search function is poor on WordPress. One useful option is at WUWT where he draws useful links together at the top eg Solar Pages but even that doesn’t link together some of WUWT best jewels.
I can accept that Google has to get income and so whilst I don’t like it, I don’t fundamentally object to them placing paid sites higher – so long as I know which ones they are!
However, this is a totally different thing. It is not boosting some sites that pay. It is all but removing some sites from searching that are not “politically correct” and giving people who specifically search for sites, totally irrelevant sites who don’t do anything for google and certainly don’t do anything for us.
So, in short Google are wasting my time – they are no longer fit for purpose!
It’s like buying a dishwasher powder and finding it only washes plates sold by Greenpeace. Yes I’m annoyed at the bias – but I’m far far more annoyed that I now have to find another way to wash all my plates.
What I’m finding is that previously when I could “just about get it right” and up would pop the right article, I’m now finding that even when I know the title exactly and there’s no way it shouldn’t be top, I’m not getting offered the article or sometimes anything else from the site. Now I have to work out ways to prevent alarmist drivel.
I now understand why I’ve been spending up to 10 minutes looking for articles when I should have found them with a couple of searches at most.
So I Googled “I can no longer categorise Google as impartial” and niklowe.blogspot.com came up as the first page at least. So sites like his (whatever he’s doing) are dominating the rankings. It appears to be a favourites blog post list. Every time his blog updates a new post (automatically as far as I an see) your link appears as a new headline on his site. Your site doesn’t appear at all.
Do the same on a WUWT post “Illegal EPA scheming on private email extended to GHG rules” and WUWT appears at the top of the page. So Anthony and Nik are doing something that you’re not.
Whereas if I search for “Scottish sceptic” you are top of the list.
It was an article that I often refer back to. I’d found it with no problem before, but a number of times I was having problems locating old articles.
What the algorithm feels to be is something like they count the attributes:
1. people are clicking on this link
2. A PC correct site
3. close match
And it returns any with at least two matches. That means recent sceptic articles appear (especially with good searches) but what tends to happen when people are no longer clicking articles is that we now find sceptic articles are not having enough “points” so they are dropping out of the internet even with a very good search phrase.
Google spider is a word search daemon though,
You must have appropriate declarations in your
website headers to gain ascendancy, but be aware
that webmasters can and do pay Google for a higher
ranking than the Spider alone would give them.
There are techniques that a user can employ so as to
rate their page higher, and simply this, do the following,
The title of the page or article should use the same words,
and in the same order as in the text of the article, Repeat
key words, from the title, but not too often (over 5 times),
or else Google spider will decide you are “spamming”.
You can employ a “Search Engine Optimiser” (SEO)
software and analyse your pages. Online and installed
apps versions are available. I make no particular
recommendations. Some are better than others.
—-
For a user who has no influence on how a page is
constructed, and mere wants to search for some
old page, with interesting archive material. Be aware
that as the years pass by, very many users will have
copied and pasted info from pages into their own
pages on websites and blogs, and facebook, twitter,
and many others of the sort.
This means when you do a search which used some
old search parameter, it doesn’t get the results that it
used to get. You must modify your “search thinking”.
Google have an agenda, yes. Google track your
searches and also pages you recently used, and
especially if you used Google Chrome. You can do
some things to help stop inappropriate search results.
1. Sign out from Google, or use a different browser
for searches such as Firefox, or even, now don’t
attack me for this….., use internet explorer for
searching Google. MS no likee Google and will
not necessarily comply with Google ranking ploys,
2. Clear out cookies before every search, or at do
delete the Google cookie every time. Various
plugins and extensions can do it easy way.
(Click & Clean app, and similar.)
3. For geeks, there is the Greasemonkey and the
Tampermonkey, which can run a user script to
delete the Google cookie automatically. It is maybe
a bit complex, but worth an effort,
4. Use Human brain, and past experience to adjust
your search. Use an “exact phrase within quotes”
as search question, for a more relevant response,
For example to find this post & etc at the top of results do –
“i can no longer categorise google as impartial”
use the quotes !!!!!
Add this using the plus symbol to make better
“i can no longer categorise google as impartial” +scottishsceptic
Use “Google SIte Search” like this ….
site:scottishsceptic.co.uk google
note the whitespace …….^
and see all your various moans about Google over the years,
Google – him a bad boy, but he can be tamed !!!
I use ixquick. Any comments on that one?