Google Manipulation of Information

By Aleksander Boyd

London 23.02.06 | The brilliant minds behind the Google phenomenom came with a strickingly simple motto: "Don't be evil." Once their do no evil company has become internet's multi headed monster, they can scrap that one and go for the more suitable, corporate shared "Don't be accountable." Readers may remember yesterday's article about how reference to the North American Opinion Research, linking to an article posted on this site, was removed from the natural rank of Google, in spite of being on the top of the search results only the day before. Frankly this alarmed me. Today, I received an email from Val at Babalublog.com saying that he could see Vcrisis' article at the top of the search, over in Miami. So I set out to do some research, and what I found shocked me even more. Below, there's a set of screenshots from different Google domains -that is to say google.com, google.co.uk, google.fr, google.es and so on, taken today in a ten minutes span starting at around 17:00 GMT. Searches for the terms aforementioned seem to vary from one domain to another, despite the fact that the option "the web" was checked at all times in every search performed, so that discrepancies in results as a consequence of sites hosted nationally, rather than in the USA, would be diminished. But even more interesting is the fact that Google, having admitted in communications to me that they haven't got the capacity to remove instantly results from the natural ranks, is misleading the public, read outright lying, for in two separate instances today results from the google.co.uk and google.de sites are distinctly different. Please pay especial attention to the results returned today from google.de (second screenshot) and google.co.uk (last screenshot) at the time specified above. As I write these lines -00.27 GMT 24.02.06- references to vcrisis have been completely wiped out from Germany (google.de) and UK (google.co.uk) domains.

Addendum: be advised that all searches referred to were not made with the utilisation of quotes. That is to say searches performed were for north american opinion research and NOT "north american opinion research"

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