It seems pretty fishy to some. Climate change skeptic and Daily Telegraph writer Christopher Booker’s popular article on what is being called ‘Climategate’ has disappeared from Google News (it does, however, still appear in natural search if the right keywords are typed in). The article was written less than one week ago, and has accrued over 1000 comments.
It is for this very reason – its growing length – that Google says the article has been removed from its News. It just got too long. Nonsense, the Booker camp argues. This is a case of skullduggery, they say.
The Climategate Article
The article, entitled Climate Change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation, said that scientists at the University of East Anglia were trying to suppress opposition to global warming policy. Indeed, these scientists, Booker explains, have been the most influential in driving world-wide alarm about global warming, and play an important role at the heart of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
In the article, Booker calls the global warming movement ‘man-made’. This, obviously, would cause some controversy.
What Happened to the Article?
That’s the question of the day. The article disappeared from Google News the day after it was published. Booker’s colleague, James Delingpole, was out-spoken about its disappearance on his blog, lamenting the fact that while his search for ‘global warming’ the night Booker’s article was published produced the story at the top of the search pile, the next day, it was a blogger pushing Al Gore’s Anthropogenic Global Warming agenda.
Not only has the article seemingly disappeared from Google, but neither Bing nor Yahoo.co.uk show results containing it.
But is this truly a scandal? Search Engine Land doesn’t seem to think so, reminding its readers that even the Telegraph’s top stories change throughout the day, no less those on Google News.
Some wonder if perhaps a hacker got into the Telegraph website and blocked the page containing the popular article.
What Google Says
Google’s explanation is simple. The article received so many comments that it grew to over 1MB, causing it to drop significantly in Google News search rankings. Says Google in an e-mail to Search Engine Land: “We’re looking at whether it makes sense to allow larger pages in the future. As with Google Search, our goal for Google News is to give users the most relevant, objective results, which is why we generate them automatically and without human intervention.”
In the end, it’s tough to say who’s got right story. It could be, as so many things are, that the truth falls somewhere in the middle. Perhaps we’ll never know, or maybe, as Mom says, it’ll all come out in the wash.
Kaila Krayewski is a freelance journalist with a passion for all things internet. Having worked for nearly two years as the public relations manager for an internation search engine optimization company, and publishing hundreds of articles (how-to, informational, and otherwise) on SEO, she knows a thing or two about the field. Furthermore, having just started up her own website blondetraveler.com, she is doing her best to keep one step ahead of the search engines in order to keep the traffic flowing.
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