Google’s Values

By Robert Farrow.

ahhh, we have another fine example of the wonderful values and commitment to freedom of speech from a liberal organization……..

Is Google Purging Conservative News Sites?

Posted by Noel Sheppard

Something frighteningly ominous has been happening on the Internet lately: Google, without any prior explanation or notice, has been terminating its News relationship with conservative e-zines and web journals. At first blush, one can easily ignore such business decisions by the most powerful company on the Internet as being routine. However, on closer examination, such behavior could give one relatively small technological corporation (when measured by the size of its workforce) a degree of political might that frankly dwarfs its current financial prowess.

It’s Not So Easy Being A Conservative E-Zine

As reported by NewsBusters, the most recent occurrence of this unexplained phenomenon was Friday, May 19, when Frank Salvato, proprietor of The New Media Journal, realized that his content that day hadn’t been disseminated at Google News as it had been on a daily basis since he reached an agreement with the search engine in September 2005. After sending the Google Help Desk a query concerning the matter, Salvato was informed that there had been complaints of “hate speech” at his website, and as a result, The New Media Journal would no longer be part of Google News. As evidence of his offense, the Google Team supplied Salvato with links to three recent op-eds published by his contributing writers, all coincidentally about radical Islam and its relation to terrorism.

Unfortunately, this was not the first conservative e-zine to be terminated in such a fashion. On March 29, Rusty Shackleford, owner of The Jawa Report, received a similar e-mail message as Salvato informing him that: “Upon recent review, we’ve found that your site contains hate speech, and we will no longer be including it in Google News.” For those unfamiliar, The Jawa Report focuses a great deal of attention on terrorist issues and how they relate to radical Islam. Two weeks after Jawa was cut from Google News, Jim Sesi’s MichNews.com was banished on April 12. In Sesi’s case, the three pieces provided as examples of “hate speech” were articles by conservative writer J. Grant Swank, Jr., all about – you guessed it – radical Islam and terrorism.

See a trend here? As a sidebar, the NewsBusters article that first broke this story on May 19 cannot be found by doing a Google News search even though other recent articles by NewsBusters can.

[…]To better understand the hypocrisy here, a little background concerning Google technology is required. When Google News launched its Beta Release Site in April 2002, it introduced to the world a new paradigm in information delivery. Its mission: To construct a totally unbiased news engine, based on a principle of human nonintervention, fully automated both in its gathering and editing of news. Google begins the process via conventional methods of aggregating news from sources worldwide, launching programs known as News Crawlers. Unlike its cousin the Web Crawler, a News Crawler is highly specialized in that it harvests information from a table of predefined news sites. This targeted approach makes for a distinctively agile transaction, allowing the crawl to be efficient and swift. This celerity is a vital attribute of a “news” crawler, as data refreshment needs to take place at short, regular intervals in order to assure the inclusion of “breaking news.”

In fact, Google ranking can actually be a determining factor in the success and, perhaps, very viability of online business ventures, especially to companies with limited or no domain name recognition. This reality has given rise to a cottage industry that offers enterprises measures to improve their standings. These Search Engine Optimization companies make use of approved and, sometimes, dubious techniques to coerce better page rankings and, thereby, superior public exposure.

[…]In the case of Google, there is some evidence that its employees lean strongly to the left. According to a February 2005 USA Today article on the subject: “As it claws for greater power, the Democratic Party has found a newly rich ally in one of the fastest-growing U.S. companies: Google.” The article stated that of the over $200,000 Google employees gave to federal candidates in 2004, “98% went to Democrats, the biggest share among top tech donors.” And, with a largely successful public stock offering making “scores of millionaires among [Google’s] 3,000 workers,” “Democrats now have a potentially potent source of cash as they fight to retake the White House and Congress.”Potentially more telling, a May 15 “Washington Prowler” piece at The American Spectator disclosed a link between Google and the ultra-left wing MoveOn.org: Google has become the single largest private corporate underwriter of MoveOn. According to sources in the Democrat National Committee, MoveOn has received more than $1 million from Google and its lobbyists in Washington to create grassroots support for the Internet regulation legislation [“Net Neutrality”]. Some of that money has gone to an online petition drive and a letter-writing campaign, but the majority of that money is being used to fund their activities against Republicans out in the states.

Beyond this, Google appears intimately tied to former vice president and potential 2008 Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore. It is no secret that Gore is a senior advisor to Google, a position that garnered him a sizable number of shares according to Fox News political analyst Susan Estrich. On May 19’s “The Big Story,” Estrich discussed with host John Gibson Gore’s connection with Google, and how the wealth generated from the shares he owns in the Internet behemoth could give him enough money to finance his own presidential campaign. This relationship goes further. According to a recent Wired magazine article about Gore, he is extremely close to Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt who “supported Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign.” Moreover, in April 2005, Google partnered with Gore’s cable channel, Current.

Like any good leftists, Google seems to have some questionable values. Instead of those evil Conservative sites on their news, what else does Google decide is better to have on their web search?

Well, We can find NAMBLA, then man-boy love association, dedicated to molesting little boys.

A search for certain key words (don’t ask) will generate images of girls of questionable age. (By the way, if you ever find any images, click here and report them.)

There are 17 million links to nazi groups. An for the hate speech bull-crap excuse they gave, a search for Jews are evil gives you 16 million sites to pick from, Jews should be killed gives you 20 million. So much for hate speech censoring…..

Charles Johnson, of LGF. fame, has several examples how terrorists seems to be more palatable the Conservatives to Google.

Al Qaeda is using a service run by Google to spread propaganda and recruit killers for the global jihad–and Google (who censors search results for the Chinese government) won’t shut them down: Bin Laden Fan Clubs Go Online.

Al-Qaeda sympathizers are using Orkut, a popular, worldwide Internet service owned by Google, to rally support for Osama bin Laden, share videos and Web links promoting terrorism, and recruit non-Arabic-speaking Westerners, according to terrorism experts and a survey of the sites.

Most jihadist message boards on traditional Web sites are in Arabic and require users to know someone connected with the board before they can gain access. Social-networking services such as Orkut, Friendster, and MySpace, however, allow users to create personal profiles and associate with “communities” based on shared interests. After users join one of these services, they have access to the forum postings in any public community. …

On Orkut, at least 10 communities are devoted to praising bin Laden, al-Qaeda, or jihad (holy war) against the United States. They can be found easily through a simple English-language search of the site.
The largest bin Laden community has more than 2,000 members, according to Orkut’s tracking data, available on the site. It has a link to the site of the Islamic Army in Iraq, the group that claimed responsibility for and released a video of a bombing Dec. 2 that killed 10 Marines in Fallujah.

[…]Google, which operates Orkut, says it tries to balance the free flow of information against the appearance of objectionable material by keeping intervention to a minimum. Google spokeswoman Debbie Frost says the service may remove obscene, defamatory, or otherwise objectionable material from Orkut sites “but has no obligation to.” Frost did acknowledge that Google deleted some terrorism-related content that violated Orkut’s published terms of service.

Google Promoting Terrorist Propaganda

At The Counterterrorism Blog, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross looks at Google’s indefensible inclusion of Hizballah terrorist propaganda channel Al-Manar as a legitimate news source: Google and the Problem with al-Manar.
Last Thursday, my colleague Olivier Guitta noted that Google carries the Hizballah-run al-Manar as one of the sources in its news section. (See this link, showing that al-Manar is still featured in Google News.) Questions have been raised in the past about the criteria used for selecting Google News sources. For example, there is a 2005 post by Michelle Malkin noting that her website and Little Green Footballs were rejected as news sources, while Democratic Underground and the malicious uruknet.info were included. What is clear, though, is that the Google team believes — rightly — that it confers a degree of prestige upon those websites that it chooses to include in its Google News feed. That is why Google’s selection of al-Manar as a news source is disturbing.

Guitta noted that al-Manar was placed on Treasury’s list of Specially Designated Global Terrorist entities and that al-Manar has also been banned in France. But to understand why Google’s use of al-Manar as a news source is disturbing, it’s necessary to look beyond the mere fact of its designation and understand the kind of propaganda that al-Manar is known for disseminating. The definitive study on al-Manar, Beacon of Hatred: Inside Hizballah’s al-Manar Television, was written by Avi Jorisch and published by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy in 2004. The research performed for the monograph was extensive: Washington Institute staff recorded and analyzed hundreds of hours of primetime al-Manar programming, and Jorisch conducted a number of interviews at al-Manar’s headquarters in Lebanon, as well as at the offices of other Lebanese TV stations and al-Jazeera’s headquarters in Qatar.

so much for an unbiased search engine……

I am not in favor of censoring anything except child porn. (I really do not even care about regular porn if you are over 18.) But to censor conservatives (as Google censored selected words for China) but allows all this other crap just goes to show you that liberals really do not care about freedom of speech, just as N.O.W. shows by ignoring the abuses of Islam that they do not care about women’s rights. Google and their Democratic allies are a bunch of hypocrites.

Let me sum it up here.

This is the values of Google

Terrorists = okay
Conservatives = Bad

Send a message: Boycott Google!