Yes, I borrowed the title of this post from a Doors compilation album. It seems to fit very well, however. Strap in - this one is strange. As you read this post, please keep the following two questions in the back of your mind: (1) are search engine results ever filtered based on a corporation’s request?; and (2) how much information is suppressed by Google and / or other search engines every day?
Oh, quick question while I have your full attention - why wasn’t hydraulic suction dredging equipment used during Phase I instead of the clamshell technology as deployed by GE? Who would benefit from an increase in suspended PCBs downstream of the dredging? Just askin’…
OK, here we go…
Used to be that if you did a search on Google with the following syntax: nyse:ge “mouth to source”
you would get a slew of pages back from yours truly. Not anymore, though.
Now you get links, none of ours at moutosource, BUT there is a message at the bottom of the page:
In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the (5) already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included (and the last few words are a link to more results).
When you click the link in the message you get our pages out the wazzoo - tons, as expected, given the tags on the posts. Hmmm… How has this strange turn of events occurred, you might ask?
Is it possible that GE - or their local hand puppets - got in touch with Google and “requested” that nyse:ge results from mouthtosource “go away”? Why would anyone do this? What kind of story could GE / Behan have given Google (if that’s what happened)? Was pressure applied? If so, what form did the pressure take? Why would Google comply with the request?
Filtering search engine results based on a corporation’s request? Whoa! Makes you wonder if anyone else get this ‘special’ treatment. I mean, when you search for golf equipment and get links to massage parlors as results it’s because of the tags, right? I didn’t know Google could do such magic…
Is GE nervous about something? About this blog? Come on - let’s remember that these are posts of news stories in public media - the who, what, where, when, why and how of the Hudson River. And, of course, this includes stories about General Electric, PCBs and dredging the river.
Why wouldn’t GE want people to be able to read what’s going on with the company? Why wouldn’t GE want their stock exchange symbol used for tagging posts about news concerning their behavior out in the wider world? Especially if someone is searching for the price of General Electric shares - GE wouldn’t want a buyer or seller of GE stock to be anything less than fully informed, would they?.
Wait, that’s right, sanitizing the news is what hand puppets and PR companies are paid for. Stay focused. Stay on message. Reality is less about the truth and much more about what you can make people believe. Or forget, as the case may be.
And what made GE or said hand puppets take action now? We’ve been tagging posts on dredging, GE and PCBs the same way for months. Well, I recently emailed someone about the fact that we popped up number one and two on Google with certain searches. What a coincidence…
I don’t wish to sound overly dramatic. Or paranoid, of course. But… Did someone “sniff” the packets going from Hudson to a third party and act accordingly?
That’s very naughty. But unfortunately possible. We’re also checking our server to see if any attempts at unauthorized access have been made lately.
OK, perhaps this is all just a coincidence. Just one of those things that happens every now and again. Maybe the hand puppet brigade only just noticed that our tags for posts about GE and PCBs included nyse:ge (if that’s the case - and if anyone but GE using nyse:ge was so important - then I reckon GE should ask for a refund of fees from their hand puppets for not noticing for so long, don’t you?). But wait, there’s more.
The same kind of thing happens when I put in a Google search with the syntax: pcb ge “mouth to source”
and this time we show up once in the ‘original’ results (if mouth to source has a number of posts tagged PCB and GE why wouldn’t they all show up on Google in response to such a specific search the way they used to?) and the following appears:
In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the (7) already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.
but after clicking the link mouthtosource pretty much owns the search results. Wow. I mean really, just wow. Because this smells an awful lot like censorship and suppression of information.
More importantly, how much other information - and on how many other subjects - is suppressed every day?
Yup, I’m thinking about that Bob Dylan song again. You know, Ballad of a Thin Man. It goes “you know that something’s happening but you don’t know what it is, do you Mr. Jones?” And rightly so, I reckon.
Well, one cool thing is we’re still the top three results when you type in a Google search for: mouth to source behan
Of course if we STOP showing up when you type in a Google search for that then I guess we should REALLY get paranoid, eh? - Hudson
Visit Behan Communications
Dredging Timeline (With a Dose of Crazy Talk)
General Electric’s Credibility Problem
PCBs and You - The Science Behind the Rhetoric
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