Google is considering the possibility of “filtering out” politically incorrect and controversial sites by adding a Truth TM ranking for their search results. It is hubris unbounded — oh hear ye, Google ranks truth for humanity! Fergoodnesssake, the narcissism of it.
It might be a “truth” ranking in Orwellian Newspeak but everyone knows that translates as being whatever government and biggest man in the room decides is true. Like every organization which silences debate and censors ideas, it will be superseded in a flash by those who don’t.
Why would Google even toy with a move that makes it as much fun as a sterilized encyclopedia? Too big for their boots — do they think They Are The Net?
By alienating the most active sector of the Net — the creative, high-risk thinkers — the buzz of the web will shift. It will become known that Google is the place to go for official boredom, and safe state propaganda. Moms and dads will send the kids to do school projects on Google, while all the adults go somewhere else. Google-fawn will become Google-yawn.
The driving lifeblood of the Internet are the people debating and hunting for the forbidden — the controversial and unpopular theories. The most motivated searchers and most passionate writers want to share exactly the kind of information the mainstream already filters out. (Otherwise, why bother?) Consider how many Bloggies the climate skeptics won compared to the officially approved competition — one unskeptical site had the entire official world behind them but lamely bailed even though the skeptic vote was divided four ways. So if Google takes the Blue Pill, it will be giving up the “edge”, and standing smack in the boring safe middle of official nothingness.
Ideas will always seek an outlet. On any computer, Google is only a click away from being replaced.
Even the Soviet Union eventually fell, simply because too many people just stopped believing in it.
Instead of letting humans figure out what is junk on the Internet, Google wonders if it can do it for them. The narcissism of believing they have the formula that beats three billion brains will be Google’s undoing.
PS: The Bloggies are on again. Thanks to those who nominated so many skeptical sites. Vote now!
Don’t forget to check your email to confirm the vote.
How’s about a link Jo?
Abe
21
For example, this link to the original research by google personnel describing what they call Knowledge-Based
Trust (KBT).
Abe
50
Good point. Two links added. Google used to be all about links and the number of incoming links. Perhaps there comes a point where the non-establishment is so strong it is outlinking the state?
120
Promote DuckDuckGo as an alternative search engine. Google looses its power if it looses its traffic …
230
DuckDuckGo is a good search engine that gives a lot better results than google and does not track you, but it pays to still set your region to your own one.
even though duckduckgo does not track you, websites still will through your browser. you can turn cookies off in most though, but you cant turn off everything such as telemetry information that firefox say is not on (opt out does not stop packets going back to mozilla).
if you really want to see whats going on, you can use something like wireshark and see just how many IPs you visit on just a simple search in IE or firefox etc.
21
Never heard of Duckduckgo until your comment. Just duckduckgo’d myself, came up top of the list. Didn’t know I was so important. Jesting aside, thanks for raising “duckduckgo” I’ll use it from now on.
00
The ABC clearly uses a similar type of ‘truth filter’.
So that makes it all right for Google to do the same.
After all, this type of information filtering system seems to work pretty well in Iran and China, and in North Korea the results are obviously excellent.
The link below is to a report published last year by a US Senate investigation into who funds the Green Blob in the United States, it makes for really scary reading and shows just how the US environmental movement is manipulated by a small group of ultra-rich left wing individuals. That’s why the proposed Google filtration system has to be firmly resisted, as it would rapidly come under the control of the Green Blob.
http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=10&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CFgQFjAJ&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.epw.senate.gov%2Fpublic%2Findex.cfm%3FFuseAction%3DFiles.View%26FileStore_id%3D8af3d005-1337-4bc3-bcd6-be947c523439&ei=Jx38VO7EB7TQ7AaK2oCYBg&usg=AFQjCNHslYYxqgAWWcfQ2FSn5sx5_3gmuw
10
Pertinent that you mention the ABC, North Korea, truth and filtering in the same comment. And this is “no sarc.”
00
Well clearly the time has come for the Ministry of Truth to start running the show…..
00
After further thought, we could start a campaign for independent search engines – or just a “We dont support Google” campaign.
Google would soon get the message and have to back down.
The reality is google in many respects is just another arm of the intel agencies now anyway….
00
The key paragraph in that google paper, Knowledge-Based Trust: Estimating the Trustworthiness of Web Sources is this:
The emphasis in the quote is mine. The reason for the emphasis is to show where the logic of the search engine giant is flawed from the outset.
First:
Iteration
The process of iteration is defined as . . .
. . . by the free dictionary on line.
As evidenced from the quote, google will repeat the following two steps to arrive at ‘the truth’.
1) a source is accurate if its facts are correct.
2) facts are correct if they are extracted from an accurate source.
While this may at first appear to be a form of circular reasoning, it is not.
Modus Ponens
A simple example from the web will serve to illustrate how this works:
If we now restate the strategy used by google, we get:
If some fact comes from an accurate source, then that fact is true.
Some new fact comes from an accurate source.
This new fact is true.
While the argument is logically valid, it hinges on whether or not the accurate source can be relied upon to begin with. This is a discussion all by itself and opens up a whole can of worms. The reliability of sources on the internet is controversial and deserves to be examined, but this is not the primary discussion that we should be having. (More to follow)
Abe
192
This appears to be the familiar process of “homogenisation”.
This too relies on algorithms to reduce data and exclude possibilities outlying preconceived boundaries. It is the intellectual manifestation of 2nd Law – the “heat death” of humanities potential creativeness into the grey uniformity of irreversible entropy. In fact if they pursued the opposite policy they would be embarking on the construction of “Multivac” the ultimate conclusion of which was “let there be light!” RIP I.A.
70
diogenese2,
It only appears to be that way because that is precisely what it is. Google first determines what is to be considered to be a reliable source of information, (what weather station gives an accurate reading), and then other sources of information, (other weather stations in the surrounding area), are either adjusted or eliminated. In the case of google, they’ll just push these other sources of information far enough down the list so as to make them irrelevant.
Abe
40
Therein lies the problem. Here in the States Obama’s DoJ, NSA, FBI, FCC, FEC, DoD, SEC et alia already have their hooks deeply into Google, who’s a mostly willing accomplice as far as I can tell. What makes anyone think the reliable sites, not to mention original truths are going to be anything other than what is on the Progressive sheet music they’re already playing? I guarantee this upcoming Net takeover will be used for this exact reason. Google’s just the tip of the spear skewering or approving “truth” right now… it’s going to get a lot worse over the next two years. Besides the Prog’s in the States censoring the Net we’ll have a few of the UN oligarchies involved as well once Obama’s minions get done giving our nation’s control away.
We’ve got our problems in the US, but I always hoped that we’d hold onto the Internets’ leash for the sake of keeping an open avenue for the truth in the world… I fear those days are coming to a close and the whole planet will be subjected to the whims of the Progressive’s One World Government repression. I’d imagine that if the UN was helping hold the reins that little kerfuffle with Pachauri would have seen the IPCC make a request to the appropriate “oversight” group and stories and links would have started vanishing and we’d still have him. I imagine sites like Jo’s and the rest of the self employed skeptic pages and blogs would be routed to the newly created Memory Hole as quickly as the pictures from our last war with Eastasia. I fear it can happen faster than we think and it scares the crap out of me.
FYI a great many of the “safe” search engines still use Google themselves so that even if they don’t “track” they’re still using search data that’s been parsed and approved by the big G.
20
Yes well this bad backfire for all the 2,3 & 4 letter agencies and google – as others have said, its a trust thing….
By way of extension – if you believed allt he 3 letter agencies, were all doomed to burn up from climate change…therefore google will consider these agencies to be “truth”, and therefore google is “truthful”.
However, as we all very well know, most of “truth” from these agencies is ddeply flawed on matters climate change and therefore untruthful.
Google has shot itself on the foot – its an attempted end run around control of all information on the internet. Google will lose, because enough people know that the multi letter agencies are not repositories of truth, far from it. IT has backed a flea bitten nag and lost.
Ironically, the tighter they try and lock down “truth” to the “offical” version, the more it looks like its an attempt to strangle freedom of thought and freedom of speech on the net.
Et Tu, Google?
00
It’s only accurate until proven wrong.
This is a big can of worms for medical practitioners.
A screaming frenzy for health nuts.
A conspiracy for UFO researchers.
30
I might be mistaken, but I see a big problem. What you’re saying in that logical chain is tautological.
If you say, “If some fact comes from an accurate source, then that fact is true,” then say “Some new fact comes from an accurate source; This new fact is true,” you’ve said the same thing twice. You haven’t derived anything useful from the first premiss.
50
Karim Ghantous,
Actually the second and third statements are refering to some new fact not included in the first statement.
The first statement only establishes that an accurate source (as determined by google) is to be relied upon to determine the truthfullness of any given statement, some fact.
The second statement says that a given statement, some new fact, comes from, or is consistent with, an accurate source.
This is not a tautology.
This is why I went to the trouble of laying out the whole problem with such detail. As I stated earlier, on first glance, this may appear as circular reasoning. A form of tautology. Please examine the construct more carefully.
Abe
40
Ah, yes, I get it now. I somehow missed the “new” part of it!
But just quickly going back to the Canadian example:
In that case, nothing useful or new is derived after the first premiss. Would that be right?
21
Karim Ghantous,
The first premise is only the hypothesis. That’s why the word if is placed at the beginning. At this point, we don’t know if Sam is Canadian or not.
The second statement is the experimental evidence, the verification, that Sam was born in Canada. (this may be accomplished by examining Sam’s valid birth certificate).
We then conclude, in the third statement, that given the evidence in the second statement, and the hypothesis in the first statement, that Sam is in fact a Canadian.
Abe
30
Of course given the accurate source (Canadian Births Deaths and Marriages) one might consider this inference truth unless of course Sam emigrated or otherwise renounced his Canadian citizenship or even perhaps Google mismatched one “Sam” with another “Sam”. in which case Google would be peddling a falsehood labelled as Stack of Bibles Truth…
“I not like green eggs and ham, Sam I am”
Bob
22
Of course given the accurate source (Canadian Births Deaths and Marriages) one might consider this inference truth unless of course Sam emigrated or otherwise renounced his Canadian citizenship or even perhaps Google mismatched one “Sam” with another “Sam”. in which case Google would be peddling a falsehood labelled as Stack of Bibles Truth…
“I do not like green eggs and ham, Sam I am”
Bob
03
But as we know, the best propaganda contains a large chunk of truth….
Therefore we could consider a certian large search engine closer to a propaganda machine than a search engine, if all we get is twisted truth to suit certain agendas…..
00
What or who (pun maybe) determines which facts are “correct”?
10
A point:
In the Google statement they use the word “facts” very freely. However, in doing so they draw attention to their abysmal, politically correct, ignorance.
“Facts” by definition are true and correct.
Since Google is so clueless as not to know even this, how can they be expected to be taken seriously in anything else?
They are going to make themselves the guardians of truth?
They must all be Harvard graduates over there.
30
A point:
In the Google statement they use the word “facts” very freely. However, in doing so they draw attention to their abysmal, politically correct, ignorance.
“Facts” by definition are true and correct.
Since Google is so clueless as not to know even this, how can they be expected to be taken seriously in anything else?
They are going to make themselves the guardians of truth?
They must all be Harvard graduates over there.
40
Google Iterative Truthing is not Modus Ponen. The Supposition is not truthed by the iteration- Sam is Canadian therefore Canadian is his birth place therefore Sam is born in Canadian therefore he is Canadian…. – no information gathered.
00
Michael,
The example I presented about ‘Sam from Canada’ was an example used by a website called philosophy index so your argument about it’s validity should be with them not me. Go there, read the explanation for yourself and convince yourself of it’s validity.
You have made the same error that Karim Ghantous made earlier. Please read my reply to that post.
Abe
10
Appeal To Authority
A simple example from the web will serve to illustrate how this works:
In this example Marilyn vos Sevant may be an authority on some things, but she is not recognized as an authority on the philosophy of religion, and therefore not qualified as a reliable source. (please refer to the link for a thorough explanation).
Courts and governments rely on expert testimony all the time. An expert in a given field will most likely present accurate, factual testimony regarding that specific field in which they are aknowledged to be an expert. But there is a caveat:
Being an expert does not guarantee the truth of a statement. Getting back to google, if we now restate their strategy, we get:
Accurate sources have determined that some new fact is false.
Therefore:
This new fact is false.
Google has pre-determined what internet sources are to be considered to be accurate/trustworhy for the extraction of facts/truth. They will then compare other internet sources against their authoritative sources, and where there is a disagreement, the authoritative sources will be placed higher in the search results and the others will be pushed down in the list.
Most ppl who use google will click on the top three listings in the search results. Even those ppl that don’t, seldom go to the second or third page.
The net result, (pun intended), will be that any challenge to an established position, regardless of it’s actual validity, will be effectively hidden from view. Rather that presenting both sides to an argument, only the authorized version will prevail. As ppl are presented with only one side at the top of the search results, clicking on these results will further re-inforce these sources as being the most popular thereby pushing any opposing views even lower on the list. (more to follow)
Abe
120
Marilyn vos Savant once claimed that the existence of a wrist watch was not proof of intelligent life. (a very early column of hers in This Week Magazine, iirc)
The Problem of Evil reduces under the assumption that the will of God is not quite omnipresent.
20
Internet browsers like Google are totally corrupt. They don’t give you what you asked for; they give you what they want to give you.
But they want to be the Ministry of Truth ?!?!
Here in the U.S. we are facing “net neutrality,” which is to be defined by the Left. As the Left considers themselves normal, and the right as insane, ‘neutrality’ is likely to be leftist dogma.
280
Gamecock,
Give Google the flick. Use DuckDuckGo …
120
Try some test searches using ‘skeptical climate change blogs sites’
What results do you get from that search?
Top of the search page I get three paid warmist blog sites which obviously are not skeptical climate change sites.
http://www.conservation.org/climate
http://ncse.com/climatehttp://ncse.com/climate
https://citizensclimatelobby.org/blog/
Followed by more warmists sites.
It does appear the Google corporation is actively pushing warmist climate change sites, hiding skeptics sites using their search engine as a propaganda tool. Pass it on. The Google search engine is being used for warmist propaganda.
I notice that initially on my first search using the above search ‘skeptical climate change blogs sites’, that Joanna’s site was on page 6 of the search. Suddenly for unexplained reasons (the reason is obvious, the google engine results were changed to ensure it is not obvious that the search engine is purposely biased to excluded true skeptical sites) Joanna’s site moved appropriately to page 1 of my search, after I did multiple searches that included climate change sites and Joanna in the search criteria.
150
Is it all Google? I see on sites that I visit frequently ads for items or websites I have looked at elsewhere. Somebody, I don’t know who, is not just watching, but pushing me.
Without having given it much thought, instinct tells me that this wouldn’t in effect be much different to what we already have. Google will stand or fall on the quality of its product. If it introduces an innovation which polarises a problem, that may be an incentive for users to seek an alternative, or it may alleviate the problem.
10
Is it true that Al Gore is a director on the board of Google?
10
Not for me- I get WattsUp and then Skeptical Science and then Climate Skeptic and then some CFact crap site. So reasonable search results even if some aren’t really science skeptic sites. Google is however is truely awful at finding what you are looking for- try the phase diagram for alumina- nothing relevant in the first 50 sites. DuckDuckGo is just as hopeless.
00
Michael,
I’m not a fan of google as a company. As a search engine they’re fine.
This comes up third when I search:phase diagram for alumina
And this PDF is the first on the list.
You may have customization enabled in search. this will affect the results you get. I keep mine off all the time.
Abe
00
Does anyone have an honest search engine? I’ve been using Google for ever, but I am over their results that are generally Lefty sites or ads.
20
It’s not just the search engine. Google Analytics and other Google software is constantly stealing from you.
I kill anything Google on my computer.
10
What is a good email company you would recommend, so that people can replace gmail?
00
The liberal have virtually complete comtrol over the MSM.
Logical that they would now attempt to control the NET… if you control the exchange of ideas, you control the people!
60
In Australia the liberals are the supposed to be the conservatives, In US the liberals are the left as in Labor here.
21
Talk about the thought police. If Goggle (misspelling intended) had existed when the debate about plate tectonics first surfaced and Goggle’s proposed “truth filter” had been active, can I infer from Goggle’s proposal that Goggle would have refused to link to papers favoring plate tectonics? If Goggle goes through with its proposal, I’m done with Goggle forever.
150
Reed Coray,
Even if millions of ppl do as you say, and they would be justified in doing so, this would not remove the most dangerous aspect of their current strategy.
Every day, there are more ppl using the internet and by inference google. There is always a first time for everyone. This is one of the most misunderstood and therefore underestimated aspects of the internet.
There are two sources of new surfers on the internet. The first source is those ppl who never had access to the internet. This may be because the country or region they live in didn’t provide the access and now they do. This group gets smaller as access becomes more widespread.
The second source is children. At some point in their lives, children begin to surf the net. Eventually they begin looking for stuff. Google is the source most of these children will go to to find what they are looking for. This means that over time, it won’t matter how many of us abandon google. They will always have a fresh input of users. And these users will never know of the manipulation being implemented on their sources of information.
This is the real danger in allowing the google strategy to be implemented. We should all contemplate this aspect of the problem before embarking on a path to prevent this program from being implemented.
Abe
80
Use DuckDuckGo instead …
90
I just set DuckDuckGo as my default.
40
I tend to search within various temporal and locational parameters (e.g. last 24 hours, last week, pages from Australia etc), and I’ve looked at DDG, and it doesn’t appear to have this immediate functionality.
I will keep experimenting though.
00
Back in 2009 I was advised by my congressman that the “draft” of a controversial law (cap and Trade) was available on the internet. He gave me the URL, but I copied it down incorrectly. I tried to search for it on GOOGLE and could not find it. I put in the EXACT name and Google did not find it. Thousands of hit on the various words used in the search phrase – but no draft of the law. In desperation I tried another search engine – The law was the very first line on my results. Flabbergasted I tried a different search engine. Again the draft law was on the top of the page. I copied the title from this “hit” added a portion of the url and put that in the google search window. NO, ZERO, hits. Since then I respect the advice of a convicted conman more than the results of Google.
170
I think the trouble is you are trying to understand the mind of a leftist (leftist = liberal in US but labor in OZ).
It is impossible to understand the mind, and thus logic, of a leftist. Try as we might, it just cannot be understood by someone with a rational, logical mind.
20
Wikipedia has lost nearly all credibility because it allows those who are pushing a particular line to correct “facts” that others may have presented.
270
Robber,
Excellent observation. I found this article on the manipulation of information on wikipedia.
From the article:
The article is from 2007 and some of the problems described in the article may have been solved. The author seems to have a good grasp of the depth of the manipulation and it seems from his analysis that there’s no easy fix.
Abe
20
Robber,
Then there’s the story reported on Bishop Hill regarding William M. Connolley who was blocked by wikipedia from editing climate change articles. (search for Connolley on that wikipedia page for details).
Abe
30
Connolley was blocked, but was soon back to his old ways. I believe he reads Jo’s site, so he can always clarify the matter.
20
Google Goggles. (think beer goggles)…
50
I had not given any thought to what Google the word means so I Googled it;
“Googol” is the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros. The term was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, and was popularized in the book, “Mathematics and the Imagination” by Kasner and James Newman. Google’s play on the term reflects the company’s mission to organize the immense amount of information available on the web.
30
Dennis – you only have there word for it! Did you follow the links – buy the book or use Wikipedia (see Robber at *5).
ALL knowledge is received knowledge and its evaluation is down to you alone. The best advice is “Nullis in Verbis” – now where have I heard that before?
30
Dennis,
Apropo to this, at the top of the search results there is an estimate of how many results were found. Aside from the fact that this is only an estimate, there is something more fascinating on the search results page.
At the bottom of the page there’s a page list in the form of the google logo where you can jump to other pages in the list. By default, google places ten results per page. Given the estimated number of results found at the top of the page, and the ability to jump to subsequent pages at the bottom of the page, one is led to believe that they can eventually access every one of the estimated number of results they quote.
This is not the case.
Unless something has recently changed, we only have access to the first one thousand results in the list and no more. That is, we can only jump forward to the next 99 pages. Including the current/first page, that’s a total of one hundred pages, times ten items per page equals one thousand items max.
If your web page is the 1001th on the list, no one will ever see it!
Abe
50
I would think very few people would look through 99 pages.
Most would refine their search long before that.
I find the subject becomes unrelated to my search within 4 pages.
60
Orwellian ideas are quite the flavour de jour these days aren’t they?
Enabled by technology, The Ministry Of We Know Best, in whatever large grey building they happen to inhabit, appear to have The Means and some perverted sense of self-absorbed moral authority.
If you think these considerations by Google are of concern then you’ll be royally entertained by this:
50
Commies and nazis would wish for Google. Orwellian reality would be far more sinister. 1984 doesn,t have computers but the search engines are in full throttle.
What is happening is the natural development of control. People thought that the internet will be their salvation, but the reality increasingly demonstrates the opposite. I predict that just like taxes and regulations the govs and fat cats will go in collusion with each other again to control the masses and shutting free internet.
The fight to enslave your mind will continue for the rest of humanity.
130
Manfred, I’m afraid they will win. Even now I look around at the hoards with their hands full of “smart” phone technology designed in parallel with Google to extract and compile everything about what we do, think and say. People willingly accept the user agreements waiving any semblance of privacy.
Orwellian? Yes yes yes yes yes.
Willingly willingly willingly Baah baah baahhha ….
40
Manfred, Mark and Dariusz,
I have written a little essay on the Orwell vs Huxley vision for the future, and as you can see at the link below my albeit amateur conclusion is that Brave New World and 1984 are not only not mutually exclusive, but that one naturally segues into the other, an interwoven fabric in a societal straightjacket.
https://1984redux.wordpress.com/2015/02/27/1984-or-a-brave-new-world/
30
Winston
Your analysis is devastating. Lived the nightmare of 1984 with the newspeak, the clueless crowds in Poland (as you may remember from my previous posts). I have even seen the elite from the inside which was not as glamorous as people on the outside thought. In fact it was mandane, scary, fearful, violent and dumb. The elite was getting a piece of substandard meat (like ox tails or mince of unknown origin) whilst I lived on artificial honey, the brown coloured sugar. The elite was prepared to defend this privilege by crushing people with tanks on regular basis as the did in 1956, 1968, 1976 and 1981. The nightmare was everywhere regardless whether you were in or out. There were no flickers of hope, life or descency. The only freedom was in my mind when I started thinking for myself at the age of 15. I discovered that I lived in this colourless soul destroying never ending nightmare where my parents comprised themselves by working with the regime and I was next in line.
When I escaped for the next 3 years I had the same dream every night. I was suddenly back being chased by the police and would always wake up just before they would execute me.
Now that dream slowly comes back. This time there is no escape. The Huxley-Orwellian vision is closer than people think and I am powerless to stop it.
60
Dariusz,
I really feel the pain and anguish in your writings about your experience under the Soviets, and how anyone could possibly read those thoughts and experiences and still call themselves a Marxist is absolutely beyond my comprehension. Yet, it seems the true believers remain undaunted.
40
What do you get for pretending the danger’s not real.
Meek and obedient you follow the leader
Down well trodden corridors into the valley of steel.
What a surprise!
A look of terminal shock in your eyes.
Now things are really what they seem.
No, this is no bad dream.
00
Google already has a senior adviser on the eco pecking order of results. His name is Al Gore …
Pointman
90
Pointman,
Source please.
Abe
10
Well, doing a google search I found this in about 0 seconds.
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2006/0605/046.html
As for money, his biggest payday may come from Google . In February 2001 Gore signed on as a part-time senior adviser. What did he get? His handlers won’t say, but if any part of the compensation was in stock or options, that equity would have to be worth a princely sum, as Google has had explosive success since then in collecting advertising dollars. For a reference point, compare Eric Schmidt, who joined a month later as the chairman and got equity now worth $5.2 billion. If Gore’s stake is just a sliver in comparison, it could still be an immense sum.
110
This is a start Just-A-Guy, found in ummm, 1.5 secs.
50
Greg Cavanagh and Manfred,
Thank you both for the links.
From JoNova Guide For Commenting:
My comment to Pointman wasn’t meant as a challenge to the statement he made, it was just meant to point out that a link saves ppl the trouble of having to google the source.
Abe
30
Yeah …
Pointman
00
It just seemed like a trivial demand to me, when it was so easy to verify.
Studies can be a lot more difficult to find, so I’m always happy to find those as links in a comment.
10
When from different IPs, public or work machines SkS and Desmog are always the first answers on any climate related subject or person then Google is not thy friend.
90
I agree that if Google move this way they will lose the public quicker than they gained them. No one with half a brain will trust their searches.
But, and I may have this wrong, if this move results in simply reducing the ranking of sites on their pages then I don’t think it will achieve anything. I think page ranking are wildly over hyped already. There are so many sites on any one topic now that when I search for something I know I’m not necessarily going to get the best answer on page one and I’m quite prepared to look through several pages.
40
I concur.
I have a web page dealing with a fairly specialised subject that was accessible from about 1992 via AARNet, eg before Internet as such really took off. So, no surprises coming in at first place on Altavista (now Yahoo) and Metacrawler (now Zoo?) when the key words were searched on. Same with Google initially, but now slipped to about third page, because of all the advertising (that I now block), SEO monkey-business, and some genuine and not unwelcome competition. Still first page with StartPage and Bing.
Google is getting a lot more nanny-ish. I got an email from Google webmaster tools pointing out that some of my pages “will not be seen as mobile-friendly by Google Search, and will therefore be displayed and ranked appropriately for smartphone users”. Useful I suppose. My layouts haven’t changed much in 22 years. Good luck trying to look at some of my stuff on a smart phone, eg drawing files with over 1 million vectors 🙂
This new “initiative” will no doubt produce some useful browser extensions and add-ons, and more choice in search engines.
30
Any organisation that has a motto of ‘Don’t be evil’, often misquoted as ‘Do no evil’, is already something to be suspicious of. Google is anything but the poster boy of niceness in this evil tech world.
90
The warmists are attempting a workaround for their fundamental problem: Observations and analysis results (there are twenty or more logical pillars/independent observations to support that assertion) in peer reviewed papers does not support catastrophic AGW (i.e. AGW where action is required to limit temperature rise). Observations and analysis at most supports lukewarm AGW (there is no CAGW problem to solve). The warmists and their corporate friends (for example Google) are hence forced (similar to a forced move in a chess game) to attempt a propaganda war and censorship as they cannot win a scientific debate.
Clumsy attempts at internet censorship will not change the facts concerning the CO2 affect (or more accurately lack of significant affect) on planetary temperature. It is interesting to note that most moderated pure science blogs have for the last two or three years banned discussion of AGW, as it was obvious to all, that the so called ‘skeptics’ can present a host of uncontestable logical arguments using data and analysis results from peer reviewed papers to support the lukewarm AGW premise.
There has been no warming for 18 years. There is no tropical tropospheric hot spot, the signature of AGW and the principal forcing mechanism for tropical region warming which explains why there has been almost no tropical warming in the last 30 years when the GCMs (general circulation models) predicted the most amount of warming should be in the tropics. Top of the atmosphere radiation analysis verse short term changes in ocean temperature, confirms the planet resists (negative feedback) rather than amplifies (positive feedback) forcing changes by an increase or decrease in clouds in the tropics. Without amplification of forcing there is no CAGW problem to solve.
The warming that has occurred has been high latitude warming which is the same pattern of warming (cyclic high latitude warming followed by cyclic high latitude cooling) that occurs in the paleo record correlating with solar magnetic cycle changes. The question is not if the sun causes cyclic warming and cooling, but rather how.
Starting in 2012 there were the first observational indications of the reversal of warming, the start of high latitude cooling (record sea ice in the Antarctic, recovery of sea ice in Arctic, and record snowfall on the Greenland ice sheet.) The warmists scientists and those political parties that have a warmist plank need to start looking for a way out.
Climate change will be the number one discussion item in the very near future, the problem for the warmists, however, will be how to explain cooling and decades of incorrect scientific analysis.
http://www-eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/236-Lindzen-Choi-2011.pdf
On the Observational Determination of Climate Sensitivity and Its Implications
Richard S. Lindzen1 and Yong-Sang Choi2
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0809/0809.0581.pdf
Limits on CO2 Climate Forcing from Recent Temperature Data of Earth
” …These effects do not have the signature associated with CO2 climate forcing. However, the data show a small underlying positive trend that is consistent with CO2 climate forcing with no-feedback.”
http://www-eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/236-Lindzen-Choi-2011.pdf
On the Observational Determination of Climate Sensitivity and Its Implications
Richard S. Lindzen1 and Yong-Sang Choi2
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/interview-hans-von-storch-on-problems-with-climate-change-models-a-906721.html
Roy Spencer: Ocean surface temperature is not warming in the tropics.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/TMI-SST-MEI-adj-vs-CMIP5-20N-20S-thru-2015.png
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/02/tropical-ssts-since-1998-latest-climate-models-warm-3x-too-fast/
There is no tropical tropospheric hot spot, Douglas and Christy paper.
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/DOUGLASPAPER.pdf
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Truth? What is truth? Someone is being very silly.
So let’s see the top 10 religions ranked by absolute truth. Ranked by turnover and adherents, Global Warming would be there. A special category of course for Science based religions like Scientology, Global Warming. Then Armageddon/disaster based religions and again Global Warming would be there and again number one far above the four horsemen and the Rapture. It would even top the list of Shaman religions, worshipping Gaia the earth mother and Green, one of the Shaman colours of Earth, Wind and Fire. Truth? Who is to judge? Perhaps Google people worship themselves as the new religion, all knowing, all wise and all powerful? No, Google is a business. They would not try to play God(s), or would they? Perhaps they see a profit in charging for religious advertising? Possibly.
70
This question of truth was the driving force in the life of my hero, Rene Decartes. He cound everyone had a different opinion and religions had their founding truths, all different. So he started with mathematics and the indisputable truth 1+1=2 and built up, creating a third axis, analytical geometry, Cartesian axes and the very equations which enabled Newton and others to find understanding and real science, the opposite of religion.
So now Google is to judge? No, they are simply after the Religious advertising dollar. Truth will have a sliding scale and you will pay more to get to the top.
91
“Perhaps Google people worship themselves as the new religion, all knowing, all wise and all powerful?”
You got it in one. But yes, they will find a way to make it lucrative.
60
People buy the National Enquirer, enquiring minds want to know. So sad, Google, RIP.
40
And you are right to be worried about this.
If Google ranks pages by the accuracy of what they contain, this site won’t even appear!
515
mandas,
The accuracy of the facts on this site is not the issue. The facts stand on their own and this site is but a conduit for the reporting of those facts.
The issue here is that google would like to determine what is true and what is not based on sources they have determined to be accurate.
Who elected google to decide for me or anyone else what is true and what is not. The whole point of the internet and it’s greatest strength is the ability to access opposing viewpoints. We refer to this as The Market Place Of Ideas.
That market place needs to remain free of any outside interference.
Abe
210
And as I tried to point out earlier; when it comes to food and health, every business that is selling a product will proclaim it to be the truth. How can Google dare to say it isn’t, and by what authority.
Then there is clairvoyance, astrology, and a million others. These subjects are all true for those who practice them. How can Google say they are not the truth on any given subject.
Seems like a psychotic form of hubris to me.
30
Leftists believe truth is observer relative. To prove it, they say they know that for an absolute fact. How do they know it? Everyone who believes as they believe, knows it to be true. This is not circular logic. It is a logical death spiral toward a total disconnect from reality.
The technical term for the logical death spiral is “Social Metaphysics”. Meaning, reality is that which is thought to be so by significant others. The significant others know because their significant others think the same way they do. The process continues recursively without end.
There is no there, there.
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Good one. Sound theory. “Mob Metaphysics” might be a better term.
30
That sound you hear is the Microsoft Bing dev team high fiving.
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Or https://duckduckgo.com/
The search engine that does not track you!
30
If you’re looking for an alternative to Google, I can recommend the DuckDuckGo search engine. In addition to not wanting to define what “truth” is, they also take privacy very seriously.
https://duckduckgo.com/tour
(Disclaimer: I have no connection to or financial interest in DuckDuckGo. Just a satisfied user for a couple of years.)
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There’s some very interesting responses above with good information to ponder.
Jo I just Googled “Climate denial websites” and you’ll be proud to see that JoNova.com came up in the first page of search results.
You know you’ve made it when Google recognizes your diabolical efforts, when accepting your “Heartland denier of justice” award make sure you emotionally quip “You hate me you really hate me!”
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Yonniestone,
If google get their way, that same search would yield websites with articles purporting to explain why/describe how these sites are not trustworthy. (as determined by google’s computer algorithms)
Abe
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What search criteria would produce the opposite of that? The climate blogs that are The Truth Personified.
00
I Bing, therefore I am.
For maximum thumbage I use Google chrome with Bing as my search engine.
30
Who gave Google the right to decide what is the truth? If they persist in going down that self-righteous road they will only destroy themselves as people go elsewhere to obtain information. I’m really surprised Google can be that stupid. But then again perhaps it’s not really a surprise and the TRUTH is they are partly evil and want to take over the role of “Big Brother” as depicted in George Orwell’s view of the world. I suspect there are some in Google who have that kind of mentality, like in any other large organization or government with too much power. It’s a human condition that never appears to escape mankind, unfortunately.
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neither of the following pieces were on first 4 pages, 20 results per page, on google when searching “global warming” or “climate change” NEWS:
7 March: EU eyes joint efforts over global warming
By Martin Banks in Brussels(China Daily)
The European Union’s commissioner for climate action and energy has said “climate diplomacy” will be at the heart of Europe’s relationship with China throughout 2015.
In an exclusive interview ahead of the ongoing two sessions, Miguel Arias Canete also said the EU was “ready to work” with China to tackle global warming…
Canete thought it may still be difficult weaning China off coal, its biggest source of energy. “There is no question that phasing out coal, the most polluting of fossil fuels, will be a challenge for China, as it is for all countries.”
The EU, he argued, has also faced the challenge of phasing out coal, a fuel that used to “coat our cities in layers of pollution”…
China’s CO2 emissions are more than four times India’s total but Beijing made a pledge, as part of the Copenhagen voluntary commitments in 2009, to reduce its carbon intensity by 40-45 percent by 2020, compared to 2005…
“Now that the US and China have followed suit, together we have provisional pledges covering 50 percent of the world’s emissions,” Canete said.
He added: “We should build on this progress and all countries should now work on their formal submissions to send to the UN as early as possible.”
http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2015-03/07/content_19748025.htm
good luck, EU!
7 March: Guardian: Robin McKie: Climate summit’s pledges on carbon cuts ‘won’t avert global disaster’
Government targets leave emission levels too high to prevent a big temperature rise, warns team of experts led by economist Nicholas Stern
POLAR BEAR PIC
The group, based at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change at the London School of Economics, concludes that action planned by countries – in particular the European Union, the US and China – will still leave the world emitting 10bn tonnes of carbon a year in excess of levels needed to prevent global warming from having devastating consequences…
“Intended national contributions will not be consistent with the international goal of limiting the rise in global mean surface temperature to no more than 2C,” states the report, whose publication follows Saturday’s climate action march in London which organisers say was attended by 20,000 people…
The group worked out how much carbon the EU, US and China – if they keep their promises – would then be putting into the atmosphere by 2030 and concluded that they would, in total, be emitting 21-22bn tonnes a year. By contrast, the rest of the world – which includes growing economies such as Brazil and India – are likely to be emitting around 34bn tonnes, according to figures supplied by the International Energy Agency. In total, this gives a likely carbon emissions output of 55-56bn tonnes a year by 2030.
However, the maximum emissions target that has a reasonable chance of curtailing temperatures at 2C has been calculated as having a median value of about 36bn tonnes. In short, the world will still be emitting far too much carbon – an excess of some 20bn tonnes a year – to give the planet a reasonable chance of holding back the heat to a manageable level…
***Investment should be increased in innovation aimed at improving renewable clean energy generation…
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/mar/07/climate-summit-pledge-fail-carbon-cuts-temperature-rise
00
how will Google gauge the truth of the CAGW numbers below???
Guardian above: “organisers say (protest) was attended by 20,000 people”.
no aerial photos at DM, max about 20 people pictured.
CAGW crowd as celebrity-obsessed as usual:
8 March: Daily Mail: Press Association: 5,000 join climate change protest
More than 5,000 protesters gathered outside Parliament in London calling on the Government to take tougher action on climate change.
Crowds of environmental activists cheered as a host of speakers including Vivienne Westwood and Caroline Lucas attacked the Government and accused it of not taking action.
Renowned fashion designer Westwood, speaking via video link, said: “As you march my models will be walking down the catwalk…
“The press and the TV do not reflect public opinion, the internet does.
“You’re not alone, people know what’s going on.
“We must keep up the fight against climate change, the clock is ticking.”
She was joined by Green Party MP Caroline Lucas.
The Brighton Pavilion MP told the crowd: “Thank you so much for being here. We are here and we are powerful.
“We are saying no to climate change and no to fossil firms…
They were led by a man with green leaves attached to his head, who was riding a bicycle with large wings bearing the slogan: “Look after your mum.”
Others chanted “power to the people, power to the polar bear” as they marched towards Parliament…
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/pa/article-2984058/Thousands-join-climate-change-march.html
no aerial pics at Guardian. maximum 20 people pictured:
8 March: Guardian: Karl Mathiesen: Time to Act: climate change protesters march in London
Caroline Lucas among speakers and Naomi Klein records video message for event, which is part of a series in cities around the world
The Campaign Against Climate Change, who organised the march, said “well over 20,000” people attended. The number of attendees was buoyed by the bright sunshine of early spring. Last September 40,000 people took to London’s streets as part of the biggest demonstration on climate change action in history…
“This is much smaller in terms of its aims and objectives [than the global day of action in 2014]. But I think it’s also just the beginning. By the time we get to Paris then we have to have far bigger numbers than we had last year in September.”…
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/mar/07/time-to-act-climate-change-protest-london
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BBC doesn’t seem to have any article on the protest as yet. nervous about the numbers perhaps?
more numbers they should be nervous about….read all:
7 March: UK Telegraph: Chistopher Booker: BBC’s climate change stance in brazen defiance of the law
When it comes to climate change, the BBC’s coverage is quite deliberately one-sided, argues Christopher Booker
Next January will see the 10th anniversary of one of the most curious episodes in the history of the BBC. At a “secret seminar”, many of its most senior executives met with a roomful of invited outsiders to agree on a new policy that was in flagrant breach of its Charter. They agreed that, when it came to climate change, the BBC’s coverage should now be quite deliberately one-sided, in direct contravention of its statutory obligation that “controversial subjects” must be “treated with due accuracy and impartiality”. Anything that contradicted the party line, from climate science to wind farms, could be ignored…
Last week, as the wave of propaganda mounts in advance of that bid to get a new global climate treaty agreed next December, the BBC was at it again, in a 75-minute documentary called Climate Change By Numbers…
As usual, supported by an array of gimmicky graphics, irrelevant anecdotes and film clips from all over the world, what these presenters omitted to say was even more important than what they did…
The fact is that they know they have a legal obligation to be impartial. They know that they are breaking the law. But they also know they can get away with it, because no one in authority will ever call them to account for doing so.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/11456612/BBCs-climate-change-stance-in-brazen-defiance-of-the-law.html
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So they want us to decide what the truth is before we research it.
Got their method from climate modellers did they?
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don’t know if this url below will come up with the images for the past 24 hours of the “climate change” london protest.
if not, do a search “climate change protest london”, click “images” & use search tools to bring up images for the past 24 hours.
top line, few people dressed as polar bears, plus a single woman. no pic anywhere on the page has more than half a dozen people.
about 9 lines down in the pics, an aerial pic from “6 hours ago” of a massive crowd…except when u click on it, it is the Hong Kong Umbrella Revolution protest.
https://www.google.com.au/search?q=london+climate+protest&rls=com.microsoft:en-au:IE-Address&rlz=1I7NNVC_en-GBAU492&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=for7VMPeEsr1oAS5moCYCg&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAQ&biw=1013&bih=410#q=london+climate+protest&rls=com.microsoft:en-au:IE-Address&tbm=isch&tbs=qdr:d
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It only takes one trip to the doughnut shop to feed their mob, so they save on co2 that way.
00
I use Mozilla Firefox as my browser. All new Mozilla Updates download automatically, so that each time you open your browser, then, if there has been a recent Upddate, it will load up with that new Update now installed.
On a recent Update (Don’t ask me when, as they arrive fairly regularly) there was a subtle and barely discernible change to the Search facility along the top menu line.
The search facility now used a small magnifying glass as its icon, and to explain it better I’ll give you all a small example.
Type in, say, The Beatles.
Now, don’t press the small arrow to go to the search results.
Press that small magnifying glass icon there and note what comes up. (I haven’t customised my search results so this is the default for that search facility, in other words, it’s what Firefox included with one of those recent Updates)
Once you press that small magnifying glass icon, a small drop down menu appears and lists all the search engines available, and mine now has ten of them. Three of those default search facilities are ebay, twitter and Wikipedia, but the others are all search engines.
Hey, just take your pick. If you cannot find what you want with one of them, just use any one of the others.
Works for me.
Tony.
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Actually I think Google are probably quite rightly frightened about damaging their reputation, knowing that any significant suspicions could quickly destroy them. So for the moment, I believe them when they say they really do just want to give us the search results we ‘want’.
Something I occasionally do is search for some of my old comments on sceptical blogs, using quoted search terms sufficiently precise that the search returns only a few or moderate number of hits. It usually leads me to my original comment at the top, so I think it is still broadly honest, though I cannot say if they would give someone else the same result.
I think the broader general problem is really what they think I “want”, when I may or may not be sure myself. I suspect the approach being discussed won’t actually get them much improvement. But look on the bright side: opinion polls consistently show a majority of voters give global-warming a very low ‘page rank’. So maybe Google will not give them what they don’t want. 🙂
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DuckDuckGo and Ixquick are decent search engines that respect your privacy but are not much better than Google otherwise. I’ve recently tried PrivateLee and had better results, but I’m not ready to recommend it yet If you have to use Google for some reason, it can be accessed anonymously through StartPage.
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It is curious that the top Google searches using ‘skeptical climate change blog sites’ to search for were all warmist paid adds. The warmists seem to be very, very, well funded. Where or where does their funding come from?
Surprise! Surprise! Surprise!
The Obama administration supplies a big swag of cash, $330 million dollars to six environmental groups. (I wonder if the environmental groups help sponsored the Obama election, win-win for someone.) The Obama administration spokesperson said the Obama administration is the most ‘open’ administration in the history of the US.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/03/07/silencing-skeptics-financing-alarmists/
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‘Even the Soviet Union eventually fell, simply because too many people just stopped believing in it.’
Pravda means truth and justice, but in the old days behind the iron curtain the locals would joke that if you wanted to know the truth you had to read between the lines.
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No. People never believed it and yet were too scared to do anything about it. Nazis were the same.
It fell because the price of oil fell and bankrupted the soviets combined with actions of the dynamic duo of Ronnie and Maggie.
Gorbachev had nothing to do with it, again contrary to a popular believe.
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Didn’t Gorbachev tell the party people communism was not finished, just changed it’s brand.
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Dariusz. I have noted your background as you told us at times.
Looking from the far, far distance that was an Australian farm, it seemed I still had better information than many of my supposedly better educated fellow Australians. I knew Stalin encompassed the deaths of tens of millions of people. I know that even today this is high in the minds of people in for example The Ukraine, and is a contributing cause of the troubles there. Many people educated at Australian universities, including teachers, either didn’t know or refused to believe this.
It is a simple fact of human nature that first hand information takes precedence over second hand information. The government that we saw in the old USSR depended absolutely on first hand memory of how bad things were before the revolution, because only that first hand memory could justify how bad things were after the revolution. I always expected that there would be dramatic changes in the social management of the countries of the USSR once the people who had first hand memories of pre revolution times had faded from influence. Then the primary concern would become how bad things were after the revolution.
When the inevitable changes did come, I was very disappointed that the Americans seemed to be promoting an instant switch to a free market economy in the USSR, because I believed that this would be quite impossible to achieve. Nobody in those countries had any experience of managing a market economy. In that scenario too much haste would release all the worst aspects of a “free market” economy. First you would get a “black market” economy.
It appears to me that I was right there. And it also appears to me that what our “current conventional academic wisdom” is trying to do to us is destroy our existing economic system so that they can install a system very like the one which failed in the USSR.
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Just so that we’re clear on your responsibility to Google-Ingsoc:
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In Oceania there is no law. Thoughts and actions which, when detected, mean certain death are not formally forbidden, and the endless purges, arrests, tortures, imprisonments, and vaporizations are not inflcted as punishment for crimes which have actually been committed, but are merely the wiping out of persons who might perhaps commit a crime at some time in the future.
A Party member is required to have not only the right opinions, but the right instincts. Many of the beliefs and attitudes demanded of him are never plainly stated, and could not be stated without laying bare the contradictions inherent in Ingsoc. If he is a person naturally orthodox (in Newspeak a GOODTHINKER), he will in all circumstances know, without taking thought, what is the true belief or the desirable emotion. But in any case an elaborate mental training, undergone in childhood and grouping itself round the Newspeak words CRIMESTOP, BLACKWHITE, and DOUBLETHINK, makes him unwilling and unable to think too deeply on any subject whatever.
A Party member is expected to have no private emotions and no respites from enthusiasm. He is supposed to live in a continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors, triumph over victories, and self-abasement before the power and wisdom of the Party. The discontents produced by his bare, unsatisfying life are deliberately turned outwards and dissipated by such devices as the Two Minutes Hate, and the speculations which might possibly induce a sceptical or rebellious attitude are killed in advance by his early acquired inner discipline. The first and simplest stage in the discipline, which can be taught even to young children, is called, in Newspeak, CRIMESTOP.
CRIMESTOP means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. CRIMESTOP, in short, means protective stupidity. But stupidity is not enough. On the contrary, orthodoxy in the full sense demands a control over one’s own mental processes as complete as that of a contortionist over his body.
Oceanic society rests ultimately on the belief that Big Brother is omnipotent and that the Party is infallible. But since in reality Big Brother is not omnipotent and the party is not infallible, there is need for an unwearying, moment-to-moment flexibility in the treatment of facts. The keyword here is BLACKWHITE. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts.
Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to BELIEVE that black is white, and more, to KNOW that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as DOUBLETHINK.
The alteration of the past is necessary for two reasons, one of which is subsidiary and, so to speak, precautionary. The subsidiary reason is that the Party member, like the proletarian, tolerates present-day conditions partly be cause he has no standards of comparison. He must be cut of from the past, just as he must be cut of from foreign countries, because it is necessary for him to believe that he is better of than his ancestors and that the average level of material comfort is constantly rising. But by far the more important reason for the readjustment of the past is the need to safeguard the infallibility of the Party.
It is not merely that speeches, statistics, and records of every kind must be constantly brought up to date in order to show that the predictions of the Party were in all cases right. It is also that no change in doctrine or in political alignment can ever be admitted. For to change one’s mind, or even one’s policy, is a confession of weakness. If, for example, Eurasia or Eastasia (whichever it may be) is the enemy today, then that country must always have been the enemy. And if the facts say otherwise then the facts must be altered. Thus history is continuously rewritten. Thus day-to-day falsification of the past, carried out by the Ministry of Truth, is as necessary to the stability of the regime as the work of repression and espionage carried out by the Ministry of Love.
1984, George Orwell
___________________________________________
Google-Ingsoc approves of this message
___________________________________________
NOTE: See the first paragraph again.
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Unmentionable,
When I was in high school back in the mid seventies, our English teacher gave us an assignment to go and look for doublespeak in any of the daily newspapers. The idea behind the assignment was based on the premise that the book 1984 was basically a political commentary on the actual situation in society in 1948, the year the book was published.
Three things stand out from my recollection of the results of our experiment:
1) When reviewing each students pick, there were about 30 of us, we all found a valid word or term which could be easily classified as doublethink.
2) All of us found a different word or term. There were no duplicates.
3) We were only about fifteen years old and we were still able to find these fairly easily.
Food for thought in the land of Oceania.
Abe
70
I always took the title 1984 to be a switch around of the publication year, 1948.
I’m not too fond of Eurasians … just sayin. 🙂
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1984 by George Orwell
This book is out of copyright in Australia so free to download from PlaneteBook. (.pdf 393 kb)
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Unmentionable: As I read your post, North Korea came to mind. I wonder how close NK is to 1984 if one took the time to analyse this.
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You mean they also have unaccountable departments of Oceania like the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO which change history and select and deselect facts as required too?
You may be on to something there. 🙂
Alternately one might suppose 1984 represents a quasi-accurate international spectrum-disorder where full-blown 1984 occurs at one end, and full-blown sanity and liberty at the other end, and all countries in 2015 fall some way along that spectrum between them.
Many seem a bit too Orwellian to me. 😉
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Somehow 1984 is often equated with some fantasy, utopia, rouge states, North Korea, Soviet Union, some crazy cultures that have little to do with the enlightened western world.
If you initially kill enough people (the elite) you will produce fear (like Cheka has done in 1917-1923 forming soviets) and eventually produce docile feeling guilty individuals (education in fact works against you as you get pumped with the left crap) then you can introduce 1984 anywhere. The 1930-ties Germany is a perfect example. Normal people were converted to killers by the hundreds of thousands with most never feeling guilty. The magnificent culture, history and pride of the German nation was twisted like in 1984.
Britain the beacon of freedom is almost relinquished now. The internal decay is well advanced anywhere in Western Europe. The 1984 with the digital age help is almost unavoidable in our world.
North Korea is violent and medieval because they don,t know any better, but the rape of our minds will continue in a more civilised western way until it is too late.
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Out of curiosity, I Googled ‘climate change’ and the results weren’t surprising, the usual culprits appeared one after the other. Then I Googled ‘climate change sceptics’ and again the usual culprits were on the top of the list, but Jo Nova did appear on the first page. So I then Googled ‘are climate change sceptics right’ and once again the usual culprits were front and centre, with a litany of arguments why sceptics are wrong.
There’s no doubt that the warming worriers control the agenda in the public arena. Little wonder that anyone searching on climate change, and knowing no better, will become a climate worrier themselves. Mind you, Bing and DuckDuckGo were not much different.
80
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Google-Ingsoc Disapproves of this Message
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I used to have a pair of those. But one got lost in the wash.
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Reminds me of Sockrates, “Allegory of the Washing Machine”.
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Just used Google to find DuckDuckgo: Oh!! the irony, beautiful irony.
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I wonder if the Google Truthvault™ contains my 1990’s “reference” articles on Drop Bears.
The web’s unanimous agreement? argumentum ad populum. Maybe Google should use another search engine to study the classical fallacies.
Google’s Truthvault™ could easily be disrupted if what they claim were really the case, by establishing a web site Contrary to Belief. 😉 Unanimity is extremely fragile.
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I wonder if Google plans to give a “truth-ranking” for Google Scholar too?
Possibly Google has studied how the Catholic Church’s system works. The “nihil obstat” (no objection) is not a certification that those granting it agree with the contents, opinions or statements expressed in the work; instead, it merely confirms “that it contains nothing contrary to faith or morals.”
See the Wikipedia entries that describe how the Censor Librorum (book censoring) works.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihil_obstat
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imprimatur
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imprimi_potest
The antidote for this way of thinking is John Milton’s speech, Areopagitica, which I was required to read during first year engineering physics course at the University of Toronto.
Extracts:
And though all the windes of doctrin were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licencing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falshood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the wors, in a free and open encounter.
He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true warfaring Christian.
I cannot praise a fugitive and cloister’d vertue, unexercis’d & unbreath’d, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortall garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.
Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Areopagitica
Full text: https://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/areopagitica/text.shtml
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The modern world has lost the art of expression. I love these old texts.
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Jo,
I don’t know if you’ve seen this yet but if you haven’t have a watch, gob-smacking take-down of Obama’s EPA head in the US as she asks/demands a 6% increase in her department’s budget, in one year under false pretenses.
It was first posted by Beethoven In:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/03/06/study-average-sea-levels-rising-but-tide-levels-have-undergone-little-change/
Link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24DP1uG-MEM
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I wish we had politicians with the spine to ask questions like that.
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LOL! 🙂
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Reply to Bobi
If Sam emigrated from Canada, to the US and became an American citizen, he would remain a Canadian because since 1977 Canada has allowed dual citizenship.
The only way consistent with the Constitution of Canada to lose citizenship is by formal renunciation.
(Loss of the Citizenship status because of fraud would not count, because in that case the person was never a Canadian citizen.)
The present Government has passed legislation that would allow the Minister of Citizenship to revoke a person’s valid citizenship, but the statute will probably be declared unconstitutional.
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I think the Googladites are realising that simple word search is a limited tool and even fancy word search adds little noticeable value. Where to then? They have rooms full of CS PhDs that have heard that knowledge systems are the future and intellectually and academically they’re stuck in dead end jobs.
The next step, as many of us working in the area realised in the 1980s or before, is full natural language systems that allow a user to query a knowledgebase in English, or whatever, working within a personally developed context of past queries and interests. Context becomes everything. They can also run basic checks on logical coherence and more if we look forward to mature technologies.
The systems don’t have to be very sophisticated to be useful. What they do need is to be personalised which is an insurmountable problem for Goggle and co because that means something that’s on your own machine and not centralised. Centrally, there is no way to do it without pushing people into a singular mindset – as seems to be obvious to most people here and naturally repugnant.
I don’t think that drawing parallels with the climate scare are far fetched. We know there are, and always have been, people who want to micro-manage other peoples lives and turn that power to their own advantage. The words ‘eternal vigilance’ are pertinent.
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I stopped using Google (except for maps) around 10 years ago. Too much PC and thought control.
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Don’t install Google Earth, as it’ll install stuff that you don’t need or want. Bing maps are OK, but Nokia Here maps are surprisingly good.
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I would encourage google to do this. It would be the beginning of the end for them. There are 100’s of other search engines out there. In one day alone, google would lose 20% of its users if it went ahead with this, Eventually google would be reduced to a yahoo or similar. Please ENCOURAGE GOOGLE to go ahead and do this.
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Well, we know about Wikipedia and now, possibly Google. But remember also the censorship of two TEDx talks by the rationalist zealots and bullies, J. Coyne and PZ Myers:
http://www.skeptiko.com/rupert-sheldrake-censored/
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Consider the awe inspiringly small proportion of self selected net users who vote in the Bloggies.
Still good to see the community responding to a threat. 🙂
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With your smiley at the end of your post, I’m assuming you agree with out reaction to Google.
And I’m also going to bet that you dismiss the bloggies, even though every blog was on an even footing with regard to voting, because you don’t like the outcome.
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No Greg, its just based on such a teeny sample that it doesn’t actually mean anything.
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Very likely true. I am ribbing just a little 🙂
We say the same thing with many of studies and online polls conducted by the likes of lewandowski.
00
That last post was a bit rushed – dog hassling for walk scenario. Now we’re exercised and have eaten I can take time to think.
You don’t need expert knowledge to dig beneath the surface of G’s claim. One of the beauties of using natural language is that everyone is an expert. We can start with their Truth Knowledgebase. How many useful truths can be expressed succinctly and unambiguously? How would you go about it? They could grab a copy of Wikipedia and have experts go over it to weed out what they thought was incorrect but would they agree? A big job but the Big G has money to burn so let’s suppose they can.
Then they need a machine that can unambiguously interpret it. Previously I said that NL systems don’t have to be sophisticated to be useful but there was a big assumption behind that. There is a world of difference, both computationally and socially, between machines that act as autonomous entities and ones that are designed to interactively help a human in a task – a prosthetic for our confused and cluttered minds and our relatively minimal memory capability. English, for example is rich with alternative ways of expressing things and our minds are highly attuned to nuance. Their truthbase will need to be translated into a simple unambiguous subset of English if it is to be autonomously reliable. As for the ‘found data’ of the web – forget it.
I no more believe they can achieve what they claim than I believe that the Earth is flat. And there I go – I’ve contaminated this great site with a statement that could send a site to big brother purgatory. Sorry Jo if the mods let it through. 🙂
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Whoever controls the ‘truth’ controls the world.
As noted in this news clip, the principal reason for controlling Google search results is to ‘rank’ searches based on agreement with ‘truth’ where truth is determined by google and friends. The Google spokesperson gave the example of the truth of ‘climate change’ (with no explanation of nuisances such as the fact that there has been no warming for 18 years, that Antarctic sea ice is the highest on record, or the fact there is no tropical troposphere warming and so on) and comparing the ‘truth’ of the climate change to the fact men landed on the moon.
The Google spokesperson stated that the current Google search engine ranks searches based on web popularity which is not true for searches related to ‘climate change’. The Google search engine already has a preset biased to pick warmist blog sites.
Google’s plan to rank websites raising censorship concerns
http://video.foxnews.com/v/4097731848001/googles-plan-to-rank-websites-raising-censorship-concerns/?#sp=show-clips
The issue is not ‘truth’ but rather the climate wars.
The following are the type of articles which are issued on Yahoo by the warmist front ‘Live Science’ which it appears is in preparation for the US election.
http://www.livescience.com/49617-human-nature-may-seal-global-warming.html
http://www.livescience.com/49650-climate-change-poll-politics.html
http://news.yahoo.com/fear-ridicule-danger-safe-climate-scientist-op-ed-184648870.html
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Agreed
This is just yet another attempt to censor dissent, informed or not
The power war is being conducted over an some assumed majority opinion, which is regarded as malleable to the best PR. Like Billy Boyo Connolly did with Wiki. If Google succeeds to some extent, how many people will actually know, or even care if they do know ?
In a power struggle (even lopsided), “right or wrong” doesn’t matter – just who wins. Google’s vain-glorious knights know that too
20
still no photos of the Climate Change protest in London showing more than a 20 people roughly. how difficult is it to go one floor up in a building & take a pic from above the “thousands”? evidently, almost no-one showed up.
the funniest thing ever is this raw footage on Youtube from Russia Today (which quotes the 5,000 figure in the description).
***watch the polar bear light up a cigarette at 20 seconds. (saw the image tweeted as “Anti-CO2 hero: smoking while dressed as a polar bear at climate scam march” with a still from the video below).
***another climate protester in a brown jacket lights up at 1 minute (middle of the screen at the end of the “dancing” polar bears etc).
***”historic” in the title below should be “hysterical”.
1min 5secs: Youtube: UK: See protesters break into DANCE in ***historic climate demo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdSiTLPpXPY&t=18
another exciting pic!
PHOTO: Placards lean on a fence, during a march calling for Government action on climate change, in central London, March 7, 2015. REUTERS/Neil Hall
https://ph.news.yahoo.com/photos/placards-lean-fence-during-march-calling-government-action-photo-162538832.html
the organisers “Time To Act 2015” have nothing on their homepage, or their FB page.
BBC hasn’t touched this protest.
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can’t stop laughing. give thanx to RT. here the “polar bears” are mistakenly called “rabbits” in the description! LOL.
UK: Police MANHANDLE costumed climate change protesters at London demo
Scuffles between climate change activists and police broke out in Central London on Saturday, with a number of protesters dressed as rabbits manhandled by police..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TN3T2w4IPjo&list=UU5aeU5hk31cLzq_sAExLVWg&index=8
this is the protest about which the Guardian’s Karl Mathiesen wrote: “The number of attendees was buoyed by the bright sunshine of early spring”!!!
UK: ‘Anarchists’ scuffle with police in climate demo
‘Anarchists’ scuffled with police in Central London on Saturday, with the group waving the red and black bisected flag associated in activist circles with Anarcho-syndicalism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_699034657&feature=iv&list=UU5aeU5hk31cLzq_sAExLVWg&src_vid=BdSiTLPpXPY&v=zc88w9hAaOQ
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pat,
Youtube is owned by google. If they get away with Knowledge-Based Trust, it’s only one step away from youtube videos being graded based on their “truth content”. 🙁
Abe
30
When Obama’s FCC elected on 26/2/15 to take control of the internet on the basis it was a public utility, both Google and Facebook reacted to Obama’s “net neutrality”.
Facebook was the first to capitulate by immediately censoring some distasteful content. Now Google is following in its footsteps.
The greatest invention that has changed the world is now under assault by the US President and the regulations and red tape to be brought to the internet that will act in a biased manner in favour of the government that controls it.
And all this was done in the most undemocratic Obama way… without public debate.
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The FCCs attack on the Internet is going to get a lot of push back. I don’t know what will happen but they are going to get a fight for their money.
In the wider view, this is part of the administration’s attempt to stop competing points of view. Talk radio is also under similar attack by the FCC. I expect a similar attack on cable TV and the aim is silencing or neutralizing Fox News.
This is all blatant censorship in violation of the First Amendment. And it’s as chilling as falling into an ice cold lake.
These days, by the way, mentioning the First Amendment makes me an enemy of the state. There is no doubt about the fact that Obama and his supporters find the Constitution to be int the way of their plans and they fear those who don’t fall in line behind them.
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Roy Hogue,
There’s a huge difference between being accused and being exposed. An accusation can always be denied in a wide variety of ways. Being exposed is nearly impossible to defend because exposure implies that there is valid proof to the accusation.
Free speech is more than just being permitted to state an opposing point of view. Free speech allows one to present evidence to back up their opposing point of view with ratioal argument and, most importantly, verifiable facts.
When you think about it, the one thing that would most likely trouble a person with something to hide is not the fear of an accusation, it is the fear of exposure.
Both “net neutrality” and “Knowledge-Based Trust” are tools that will hinder free speech and as a consequence reduce or even eliminate the ability of free-thinkers to expose those who have something to hide.
Abe
60
Just-A-Guy,
They want to silence even an expression of dissent because that can and does start other people thinking about what’s going on. That alone starts to shine the light of day on the activities they want to keep in intellectual darkness.
You are correct however — they fear the exposure even more than the dissenting opinion.
Far too many U.S. Government departments have become political tools to be used to silence opposing points of view.
– Internal Revenue Service
– Homeland Security
– FBI
– Bureau of Land Management
– Forestry Service
– FCC
– Justice Department
– EPA
– Department of Education
There’s no trick to following what’s going on. You need only pay attention to the right news sources and do a little adding 1 to 1 and seeing that the result is 2.
30
Just the normal march of social totalitarianism. Go read the United States’ FCC 300+ pages of Internet Regulations cleverly called “Net Neutrality”. Oh, sorry, only the central government has a copy (i.e,. not published as of today but has been “passed” by central gov).
60
the “rabbits” might not have been in the youtube video, but HuffPo has Time To Act rabbit placards in a pic in their highly-exaggerated article. all their pics/tweets etc are ridiculous.
HuffPo has 15,000, then 5,000? more like a couple of hundred from what was seen on the video footage posted earlier:
7 March: HuffPo: PA/Paul Vale: People’s Climate March In London Draws Huge Crowd, Including Russell Brand
More than 15,000 protesters gathered in London on Saturday for a climate change march, which is to end with a rally outside Parliament. Activist Russell Brand is scheduled to deliver speeches near Westminster…
***TWEET: Max Wakefield: The rabbits are coming (PIC)
PHOTO CAPTION: More than 5,000 gather for Saturday’s march through London…
On Friday, US Vice President Joe Biden mocked members of Congress that denied climate change, saying it’s “like denying gravity.”
Speaking to VICE founder Shane Smith in an interview for HBO, Biden said: “It gets to the point where you can’t look anyone in the eye seriously and say, well, it’s nothing having to do with manmade.” On members of Congress who deny climate change, Biden said, “It’s almost like denying gravity now… the willing suspension of disbelief can only be sustained for so long.”…
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/03/07/thousands-gather-in-london-for-climate-change-march-led-by-russell-brand-and-naomi-klein_n_6822680.html
Google would need a supercomputer to sort out the TRUTH about this “climate” protest. in the meantime, we’ll get results such as the HuffPo one about “huge” crowds blah blah, plus, of course, the celebrity angles.
40
pat,
🙂
But then, who was it that said, “Why let the truth get in the way of a good story?”
30
Good old Google. Why is it that big success always causes a swelled head? 🙁
It’s not that the Internet couldn’t use a good dose of truthfulness but it’s not up to a search engine to do it. Who sets the standard?
Oh! Wait a minute. It’ll be the radical left version of the truth will it not? After all, it’s silicone valley, that great bastion of political neutrality. 😉
Google eclipsed a number of other search engines by becoming the best of the lot. But Bing is very good and perhaps there will be a big resurgence of other competitors. It would be nothing more than the marketplace doing the job it always does.
50
Google can easily be destroyed by people power, e.g. by using Bing and the other services of Google’s competitors. I’ve stopped using Google.
00
First thing to do is QUIT referring to searching on the internet as “Googling”.
I don’t google. And my good friends don’t google.
I don’t know why anyone would google.
it just doesn’t sound right…
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Well in such case “googling” gets a new meaning 🙂
30
Your thinking of “ogling” (or perhaps I’m thinking of ogling).
But yea, words can change their meaning, and Google could end up meaning intrusion and control by proxy.
40
To be told what is true is restriction,
And will likely cause Internet friction,
‘Twas Galileo in jail,
Who fought tooth and nail,
To prove that some ‘facts’ were pure fiction.
100
Brilliant…again!
50
So… “consensus” rears its ugly head again.
50
One of us, one of us.
It needs either an enlightened mind, or an outsider’s perspective to see things clearly.
To be honest, I can’t think of anyone other than Obummer and Marxists who would think this is a good idea. Has anyone else supported this move by Google?
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Google is not the only search engine with web crawlers. They will just loose market share, and hence advertising revenue. If that is their choice … ?
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PC is the difference between perception \ wishful thinking and reality. And, yes, Google is a click away from being replaced. Google does do a good job but a much better job could easily be done with the finance and development put in.
00
Don’t youse guys just hate the free market?
00