I'm curious as to what members think.
They would seem to be an obvious target in the imformation war.

I first thought that it may be possible only today.I'll explain what happened.

I was searching for an historical overview of Iran.Recently we have had a few topics started on the recent protests and I wanted to give a sound historical base to my post.
I Googled and the first two pages gave timelines that reflected the US view of Iran's history.ie The US were right to overthrow a Prime Minister and install the Shah.Economic prosperity and freedoms were the consequence.Human rights abuses under the Shah were glossed over.Human rights abuses under Khomeini were highlighted.

Now the question I'm asking is not to do with Iran.It's about Google.Did this happen because.

a)That's the true unbiased history of Iran.

b)There are more websites hosted by Americans with that view of Iran's history.

c)Only this view of Iran's history has been allowed on the first two pages.

That these sites are more popular is not really an option.We can not know if their popularity is because of their position on the Google search or that their position is because of their popularity.

It struck me that web censorship is very difficult but most people find their imformation via search engines.I rarely search past page two(I'm very lazy like that).So it would be far easier to restrict imformation this way.

What do others think?

Have you had similar thoughts?

[Edited on 16-6-2003 by John bull 1]

Great point John. I think that this has been going on for years.

If we went to China do you think the results would be the same as those that we may find here in America or in Britian????

I doubt it.

What about Eygpt????

Do you think that the government in Eygpt would allow their crimes to be spread about????

Highly unlikely.

How some could deny this is beyond me.

I got an idea.

Let us find all the nationals we can and do some research.

I know we have plenty of people from America and Great Britian.

But what about everywhere else.

Nans could be our French connection and Estragon or Great Wall could be our Chinese.

Who else is out there???

Are there any Iranians or Iraqis?????

What about Russians????

Name you nationality if you are willing to help us in this research and you are not one of the posters mentioned above. The more we can get the better.

I hear that Gyrffen is going to Eygpt soon.

Maybe she can help us be the researcher for the Eygptian project.

Please if you know we could use your help, help us.


Abraham

Grommer is in Germany and Xaos is in Switzerland.
We'd have to think of two or three words and then we could all copy and paste our results.We'd have to do it at the same time though.

Originally posted by John bull 1
Grommer is in Germany and Xaos is in Switzerland.
We'd have to think of two or three words and then we could all copy and paste our results.We'd have to do it at the same time though.

Exactly. Let us see how many other countries we can pull in. Lets give this one a few days. We can gain more I am sure of it. Switzerland, Germany, China, America, Britian, France, and Eygpt are not enough. We need more than that. Most of those countries are all controlled by one or any other in some way any how.

Magesitca is in Okinawa which is considered Japan isn't it???

I think I have seen at least one person claim that they are from Israel so that is another so as long as we can reach that person.

Can anyone think of anyone else who can help us in this research???

If so then get in touch with them and direct them here.

That would help us greatly.

Oh yeah, UP is in Belgium so that is another.

Anyone know of any more?????

First we would need to know how the search engines perform there searches. Perhaps language may have something to do with apparent bias. I. e., English input, sites in English get listed first, German input, sites in German get listed first, Japanese input, sites in Japaneses get listed first, etc. Also location may have something to do with it, in the USA, American sites will be listed first, in the UK, British sites get listed first. Also there is quite a difference between different search engines.

And because of it, i know already, being in different countries, i already experienced the search engine problem, here in holland, and in spain, searching for a web site, or clicking the same link, may be a difference depending from which engine and which country you do it, Google is a huge search engine, but be carefull, it has priority programs as well, as it has google.it (italy), google.fr (france) google.nl (holland) google.de (germany), google.com, and many more, u can type them and u will access the google in different versions, try to search for the samething and maybe u will experience something different. Anyway altavista it is not bad, btw i´ve heard about the "creators of the google" and their connection to the NWO elite, but can be disinfo, but sounds more like logical....

Actually I think success in Googling has had more to do with the search engine marketing expertise of web site developers than with political interference. So far.

Things that lift sites in search engine rankings (apart from purely commercial payment arrangements):

* placement of key words higher up on the web page gives greater weight in search engine ranking
* search engine friendly elements - title tags, heading tags, alt tags, hyperlink text
* getting rid of poor technological choices that search engines don't read - drop-down menus, frames, splash pages with no rich content, superfluous text in title tags, poorly labelled links.

That's the extent of my knowledge. Two days' training. I'm no expert. But I question whether there is huge government influence on search engine policy - it could only work through knowing how the search engines work and beating other web site developers at the search engine game. There must be some web media designers around these parts who could enhance or rebut what I said.

Interested in the results of your informal research!

I'm definitely up for a little research. When I hit google I can choose to search from sites in German, the whole web, or sites only in Germany. So let's coordinate this thing and figure something out.

If I'm not mistaken, the tags in HTML used for good placement of keywords is the meta-tag, but MA is right, outside of a paying agreement, sites are pulled up normally by what's searched for, and what comes up first in the meta tags.

Originally posted by John bull 1
I'm curious as to what members think.

I'd like to think I have a reasonably informed "insider's" position on this.

In a word, no, at least not yet, but most likely never. I knew some of the original software engineers who built Google, two are still there and work on the search engine on a daily basis (I sometimes see them at industry functions). The Google ranking engine is exceptionally complex, there are currently 127 different routines that categorize, rank, and store Google Bot results. Almost every one of these are tweaked in some way on a monthly basis... hence the industry's much feared, "Google Shuffle" (when you rankins can suddenly change for no reason). There are three primary factors that effect ranking on Google:
1- The "page rank" of sites that link to you.
2- The content of your pages
3- The quality of your site's HTML (which makes it easier for Google to rank the content)
Page Rank is the most imporant overall factor, sites with a high page rank have thousands of sites linking to them, thus a high page rank score... and if the sites linking to your site have a high rank, your score is helped.

Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google (whom I met once, 3 years ago) is rabid about delivery relevant search results. Craig Silverstein, the CTO, is hell-bent on making all their systems as accurate as possible. They fight a monthly battle against search engine spamming... hundreds of bogus pages of links in an attempt to improve page rank.

It's not impossible to imagine that Google might be forced to alter it's rankings for political reasons (there is also a human-factor as teams of people watch search returns from time to time and make adjustments so that future returns imporve). But given the corporate culture, unlikely.

However, they did tweak their returns specific to users in China, so we know it is possible. If anything, it's likely that the pages you found showing a skewed viewpoint had more pages linking to them.

Thanks William.

So if we all typed. "Israel Palestine" and we all did a world wide search at the same time.Regardless of our geography we all receive the same page with the same matches.Is that right?

It seems to me that if a search engine(we'll call it Gargle)was given the choice between sites being censored or being limited in this way.Gargle would decide to limit the site by not showing it as a popular match.

We all know what happened to Al Jazeera website recently it would be far easier and less suspicious to make it's page rank artificially lower.

I think you are right it may not be happening now but as a concept to watch out for......................???
It would be hard to prove and must be seen as a viable way of controling imformation you may not want your population to find easily.
If Gargle is popular and your country wishes to skew the imformation available it would an ideal way to do so.

It's worth a test.

Here's what we should do.

We need as many people from different world regions to participate.

Everyone should perform the following three searches on the normal Google home page:

Israel Palestine conflict

George Bush WMD Iraq

Russia Iraq France Germany

Exactly as I just typed them, do not surround these search terms with quotes.

Then do two things:

1. Save the FULL URL Google returned (it has important clues if we end up seeing different returns).
2. Save the search results page as HTML to your local hard drive.

DO NOT POST THE SEARCH RESULTS HERE Google search returns are copyrighted, I'll "sanitize" the results and post them on this thread.

Send me a U2U, and I'll give you my personal e-mail address, send me the URL of the search returns, and attach the HTML page.

Once we get results from at least 5 distinct global regions, I'll post the results here to see if we get any differences. And if we do, I'll know who to ask on the "inside"

Google is notorious for tracking people. Use allltheweb instead. The internet is not at all anonymous, even if you disguise your IP. An easy tip is to disable cookies, but that is basic.

Originally posted by Freddie
Google is notorious for tracking people. Use allltheweb instead. The internet is not at all anonymous, even if you disguise your IP. An easy tip is to disable cookies, but that is basic.

From what source have you obtained this information about Google?

Disabling cookies only makes using the web harder.

Perhaps you might help us understand your position better.

I do not think that it really matters what country you are in. I always use yahoo search and I would turn up the same results as you would. The real trick is what search you use. The Yahoo results will be different than MSN or Lycos. Or use, say, google.ch rather than google.com. If you want I could try Croatian search engines.

As for surveillance, should I be searching for "hot S&M boys in leather" if I dont want anyone to see it?

XAOS