I was scanning through the global warming stories on Google this morning** – using “show latest” – which shows me (most of) what it appearing, not what Google tell me I should read. when I suddenly spotted an article by Roy Spencer, PhD at www.drroyspencer.com/ “that’s odd” I thought, I’ve not seen a sceptic blog appearing for a while. How come that has appeared? Trying to rationalise it I decided that perhaps being an academic the Google algorithm boosted his ranking despite being a sceptic and that perhaps I had missed it before. But then a few entries later I spotted:
Watts Up With That? | The world’s most viewed site on …
Former meteorologist and weather expert Anthony Watts maintains this site, skeptical of the man-made global warming topic.
No, I had not last visited WUWT in June. Instead, last time I had found a link from Google to WUWT was in June.
Also, it must be several months since I last saw WUWT in the news feeds. This shows something has changed. Whilst, we must still assume Google is wholly biased against sceptics, perhaps the bias will now be in a less obvious and less testable way.
**(I can’t even find Yahoo news – and unfortunately if I change I won’t have a sense of how the global warming “story” is changing)
Sceptic site are routinely visited by people using book marks. Perhaps the problem is few people are searching for them?
There was a noticeable change a few months ago. Firstly, I suddenly found extreme difficulty finding articles on WUWT which I had found before without much problem. Second, I noticed that Sceptic blogs had disappeared from the news feeds.
This fits in with the alarmists culture of google which we’ve seen evidence for in the past. This suggests the organisation has more than its fair share of global warming zealots and less than its fair share of sensible sceptics.
And like the temperature record, as soon as you allow humans to use their “judgement”, if those involved have a personal vendetta against certain groups, then they will use their “judgement” to attack those groups.
Most likely a few idiotic zealots do stupid things which the Google management “turn a blind eye toward”. So, most likely some greenspin activist can influence how searches are carried out and keeps dreaming up ways to attack sceptics and google management either condone or don’t care about their overt bias.
I think Climatedepot recently highlighted Google’s apparent behaviour (had a link, not sure if it was to this site) and that has perhaps made Google backtrack a little as Climatedepot is reasonably influential (site traffic), although in general Google is just messing with us, aren’t they? Personally I use Feedly to grab everything anyway.