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Haley Barbour and Google

By: Leon H. Wolf (Diary)  |  March 16th, 2011 at 01:01 AM  | 

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Just now I went to look for some information on Haley Barbour (one of my early 2012 favorites) on Google and this happened:

Now, I have less understanding of how Google works than I do of most voodoo rituals (and I have a sneaking suspicion that they both involve chanting in languages humans don’t speak and the blood of chickens). Some people are going to assume that Google has been monkeying with the autocomplete results and they have certainly admitted that they are capable of doing it and are in fact doing it right now in certain contexts. So, that is one possibility. The other possibility is that “racist” is legitimately the number one associated term with “Haley Barbour” when it comes to Google searches.

Either way, this would seem to present a problem for a guy who is probably going to have to face it down squarely anyway. As a driver of information, Google is no longer an entity capable of being dismissed as I would gather that it is more significant now than the print versions of several of the largest newspapers in America combined. And when people go to learn for the first time about Haley Barbour in the internet, Google is apparently going to tell them that one of the most significant things to learn about Barbour is, apparently, “racist.”

COMMENTS

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  • Adjoran

    The Left has become adept at planting results high on the Google list, which also leads to their inclusion on auto-complete.

    They use the words they want to and then cross-link each other a bunch of times and WHOOMP! – dere it is!

    • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

      Google claims to work actively to stop people from gaming the system… yet somehow it constantly happens in left-friendly ways.

      • schteve

        If not, I wouldn’t expect any other results.

        • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens
  • keven

    Interesting. I googled Haley Barbour racist and Haley Barbour for President. There were 150,000 more results for Haley Barbour for President. I then used quotations and there were more then double for “Haley Barbour for President”. Yet racist was higher.

    I then did Mitch Daniels, Sarah Palin, Chris Christie, and Mitt Romney. On my Google page only 5 suggestions occur. All 5 had one negative suggestion word shown. The terms weight, height, and crosshairs occured. You could argue Mitt had two, Mormon and net worth. Net worth? Mitt Romney net worth is what people are looking up? Thats what is important? I can’t stand Mitt Romney, but come on!

    I then looked up Barack Obama, Harry Reid, Hillary Clinton, and Nancy Pelosi. Of the four, none had a negative term suggestion of the five shown. None.

    Google has become the evil they said they would not.

    • http://blog.khelek.us Brian Johnson

      Al Gore yielded ‘divorce’ and ‘invented the internet’
      Bill Clinton yielded ‘impeachment’

      I was ‘meh’ on these given the context, though will admit that’s not what they want to be remembered for….

      What I did find *very* interesting was my search for Ted Kennedy. Funny that ‘mary jo kopechne’ or ‘chappaquiddick’ were missing from suggestions. Apparently he’s most known for his brain tumor and quotes…..

    • johnCV

      a list of leftist blogs and organizations. In order:
      daily beast
      huff po
      npr (shocking isn’t it for such a balanced ‘new’ organization)
      capitolhillblue
      wikipedia
      crooksandliars
      burntorangereport
      dailykos
      uktelegraph

      And there you have the lefts ‘information’ factory. Leon is right that google is evil, never trust them. They serve as the conduit and booster of this propaganda. But from their perspective, they are doing Dog’s work.

      Information is power.(Number 6 knew that)

    • chihank

      Lbierals have linked Rick Santorum to being obessed to obscene behavior on Google.

  • disintelligentsia

    if you have a group of individuals with nothing of substance to do with their lives and who have the mentality of a four-year old who has to resort to name calling because they’re impotent to force the world to see their (self)importance. Look up the term “Google Bomb.”

    While I don’t put it past Google to do this kind of juvenile search-term poisoning, they are rather leftist after all, I’m more inclined to believe this banality flows from the keyboards of DKos (or substitute your favorite leftist site – DU, Moveon, etc) kiddies. The reason why leftist figures aren’t similarly targeted is simple: Conservatives are adults and don’t resort to screaming “neener-neener-neener” when their favored candidate doesn’t win.

    • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens
    • schteve

      They make it clear that autocomplete results only come from actual search queries (http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=106230).

      The only way to game it would be to get millions of people to type “haley barbour racist” into Google. I suppose you could think the left has managed to do that somehow, but it’s certainly not as easy a task.

      • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

        It’s part of a Google-wide issue of leftys being allowed to game all their systems. Youtube, Blogger, everything.

        • schteve

          I think left wingers are the only ones who actually take advantage of the way Google’s algorithms work, though.

          • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

            That’s the story.

          • schteve

            Obviously Google doesn’t like artificial search results popping up as a result of anyone, but that’s unfortunately what their service is chock-full of these days. Everyone from SEO “experts” to Dan Savage knows how their algorithms work and has abused them to the point of Google results being meaningless at times.

            I can’t really say the same is true of the search queries users actually type, though. That’s what this article is about.

  • smitch61

    Personal decision, I ‘ask.com’ or ‘bing’ it, for now anyway.

    • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

    • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

      Lots of conservatives do use a number of google services. Even if you don’t, it’s still relevant what Google does.

  • gumbi5

    so any conservative or Republican who continues to use Google is giving ‘em the power to help Obama and implement his policies with money or what you see here… The solution is simple, use Yahoo, Bing or any of the alternatives for your services whenever possible. Yahoo mail is easier to use than gmail, they put news on their search page and you can get your facebook and twitter updates on your mail page.. They can host your web pages very inexpensively. What’s not to like. Best of all, by using another provider you are reducing the income available to Google to contribute to Democrats/Obama.

  • http://www.scragged.com petrarch

    It’s a private company, they have a right to their own spin. The only way to do something would be a) create our own competitors, as we’ve done for the MSM or b) attack their credibility, as we’ve also done for the MSM. But both take many years and lots of money.

    Just another hill conservatives have to climb that liberals don’t, which is why successful conservative politicians are generally far more competent and intelligent than successful liberals: they HAVE to be.

    • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

      Being private does not make one beyond criticism.

  • http://www.scragged.com petrarch

    Free speech and all that.

    But there isn’t anything to be DONE about it, in the sense of government action to force them to change, other than the two options I cited which are impractical for reasons stated.

    • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

      I didn’t call for government. Did Leon?

      Not all things a society does must or should go through government. We have more tools than that.