Algorithm or “Al-Gore”-rithm?

Harold Ambler:

Among the points of interest in the unfolding climate scandal is the fact that the term “climategate” rapidly eclipsed global warming in the number of links produced by a simple Google search.

As is standard, Google’s auto-suggest function facilitated this, several days into the story’s evolution.  Anyone typing in the letters c-l-i would see the suggested time-saving choice of climategate.  Within a day or two of the auto-suggest function being added for “climategate” it had become the top item in the list.

Suddenly, though, on Monday December 1, Google stopped offering “climategate” as a choice to those who typed c-l-i and even to those who typed c-l-i-m-a-t-e-g-a-t. Strange.

So he wrote ’em a note, and got back:

Hi Harold,

I can verify that Google has not ever removed the query [climategate] or variations of the query from Google Suggest.  It was never a “decision” as you suggest in your question, but instead it may have disappeared from the Suggest feature because of a normal update of the Suggest feature.  The suggestions change dynamically over time through automated processes based on relevance algorithms.

Google Suggest uses a variety of algorithms in order to come up with relevant suggestions while the user is typing.  We do remove certain clearly pornographic or hateful or malicious slur terms from Suggest, but we have not removed anything in this case.

Hope this helps,

Jake [Hubert, Google Global Communications Department]

Well, yeah, except that doesn’t exactly explain why "global warming" (11 million links) or "climate gate" (note the space, 10 million links) get auto-suggested, but "climategate" (now over 30 million) does not.  In the comments, Harold’s readers report similar behaviour with google.ca, google.co.uk, and google.com.au.  They also note Al Gore’s position as a member of Google’s board (pointing to the obvious pun).

Here’s Google’s auto-suggest for "climateg", as of a couple of hours ago (Sorry about the quality, I can’t screencap javascript popups and so had to photograph the monitor face):

The suggestions I was offered:

Despite the fact that the link count for "climategate" is now over 30 million:


As America’s information sources morph increasingly toward the Soviet model of concealing as much as they report, people are noting this stuff.  Allowing it to occur (even if innocently) only encourages the paranoia.

LATER (091219 19:25), Related:

Via:  Andrew Bolt.  Title idea from Neil Jones.

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