Climategate crashes Google?
What’s going on up in Mountain View? Climategate seems to be crashing their algorithms. Recap: Christopher Booker wrote an article for the Telegraph about climategate tag-lined Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with the Climategate whitewash. You can guess the line it takes.
His colleague at the Telegraph, James Delingpole, noticed that the extremely popular article had disappeared from Google News:
What is going on at Google? I only ask because last night when I typed “Global Warming” into Google News the top item was Christopher Booker’s superb analysis of the Climategate scandal.
It’s still the most-read article of the Telegraph’s entire online operation—430 comments and counting—yet mysteriously when you try the same search now it doesn’t even feature. Instead, the top-featured item is a blogger pushing Al Gore’s AGW agenda. Perhaps there’s nothing sinister in this. Perhaps some Google-savvy reader can enlighten me…
If that’s all that I’d read about the topic, it would have struck me as a bit paranoid. News items appear and disappear from Google News all the time. It’s not like they have the space to list every current article in every paper. But then Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land wrote about it and got a comment from Google. Nothing to worry about, says Google:
The article attracted so many comments that it exceeded a threshold for the page being too large (it’s more than 1.3 MB of HTML at this point). We’re looking at whether it makes sense to allow larger pages in the future. As with Google Search, our goal for Google News is to give users the most relevant, objective results, which is why we generate them automatically and without human intervention.
Think about that reasoning for a moment. Go back to Delingpole’s quote of one measure of an article’s popularity. According to Google, the Google News algorithm is specifically designed to remove extremely popular stories. If an article is popular, and people are talking about it a lot, sending traffic to it, and leaving comments on it, Google News decides it’s no longer newsworthy.
And they are looking at whether maybe that doesn’t make sense? Maybe? I’m beginning to hope that they really are deliberately spiking climategate. It would be more comforting than knowing that not only are their algorithms inane, they can’t even recognize the obviousness of it.
- Climate change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation: Christopher Booker
- “Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with the Climategate whitewash, says Christopher Booker.” (Hat tip to Kaila Krayewski at The Booker Climategate Article - Scandal or Indexing Problem?)
- Climategate: Googlegate?: James Delingpole
- “What is going on at Google? Last night when I typed ‘Global Warming’ into Google News the top item was Christopher Booker’s superb analysis of the Climategate scandal. It’s still the most-read article of the Telegraph’s entire online operation yet mysteriously when you try the same search now it doesn’t even feature.” (Hat tip to Kaila Krayewski at The Booker Climategate Article - Scandal or Indexing Problem?)
- Of Climategate, Googlegate & When Stories Get Too Long: Danny Sullivan
- “Daily Telegraph writer James Delingpole got worked up yesterday because his colleague Christopher Booker’s story on the ‘Climategate’ scandal mysteriously disappeared from Google. Skullduggery, he pondered? Nothing so dramatic, says Google. The article simply grew too big in length to stay in Google News.” (Hat tip to Kaila Krayewski at The Booker Climategate Article - Scandal or Indexing Problem?)
More Climategate
- Lord Christopher Monckton in San Diego
- I went to see the Americans Protecting Private Property Rights presentation by Lord Christopher Monckton about the economic and scientific fallacies of the anthropogenic global warming movement last night. It was mostly stuff I’ve seen before, mainly from the climategate emails and software leak.
- Coal in their stockings: climategate Christmas
- If unknown data tracks known bad data, it’s a good guess there’s something wrong with the unknowns as well.
- Google responds to Climategate-gate
- I’m guessing Google got a lot of questions about this; their response didn’t answer my question.
- The (para)psychology of climate change research
- The “they meant well” circling of the wagons reminds me of a branch of scientific research popular when I was in college: parapsychology. Failure to create a falsifiable model ultimately led to an almost religious belief that even cheating proved the existence of psi.
More Google
- What app keeps stealing focus?
- I’ve been having a problem on Mac OS X with something stealing focus. Here’s how to at least find out what that something is.
- Google: This is a closed out of date discussion
- Google’s Blogger forms are a bit on the wonky side when they close a topic.
- Google responds to Climategate-gate
- I’m guessing Google got a lot of questions about this; their response didn’t answer my question.
- Google hacked by climategate deniers?
- I can’t believe that Google would actually remove climategate from their common search drop-down. But something appears to be happening here.
- Google Maps location-sensitive ads?
- It looks like Google Maps is providing location-sensitive ads.
- One more page with the topic Google, and other related pages