Search Engines Censoring ClimateGate?

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Or an inside job attempt at preventing Brooker story from going viral?

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Monday, November 30, 2009

A fantastic article written by Christopher Brooker of the London Telegraph exposing the climate change fraud rocketed to the very top of a Google News search for “global warming,” only to disappear hours later.

“What is going on at Google? I only ask because last night when I typed “Global Warming” into Google News the top item was Christopher Booker’s superb analysis of the Climategate scandal,” writes James Delingpole.

“It’s still the most-read article of the Telegraph’s entire online operation – 430 comments and counting – yet mysteriously when you try the same search now it doesn’t even feature. Instead, the top-featured item is a blogger pushing Al Gore’s AGW agenda. Perhaps there’s nothing sinister in this. Perhaps some Google-savvy reader can enlighten me.”

Another blogger noted how other versions of the article appeared, but the original had been “disappeared,” despite the fact that other London Telegraph articles showed up as the top ranked result when entering their headline.

“That is using the search string: “Climate change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation” – which is the full headline of the piece. It shows up where it has been quoted in full by other sites, but of the Booker column there is no sign,” writes Richard North.

In addition, searches for previous Christopher Brooker articles show up as top links – it’s only this particular article that has seemingly been targeted for censorship.

The same de-listing of the article is evident on other major search engine websites like Bing and Yahoo.

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Despite the fact that Google has been caught gaming its search results in the past, this is more likely an “inside job” as it were.

It appears as if one of the editors at the Telegraph has gone into the backend of the Telegraph content management system and checked an option that prevents search engines from indexing a particular article.

“My guess is that this isn’t a Google issue. The problem probably lies closer to home – there looks to be an enemy in the camp, who has probably been using this, or something like it,” writes North, referring to a code that is inserted into a web page in order to block it from being ’spidered’. This is sometimes done to prevent site ripping and other hacks, but it also has the effect of barring search engines from being able to list the page in their results.

The fact that this has been applied to just this one article suggests that some higher-up at the Telegraph from the warmist camp was concerned about how the article had gone viral and wanted to contain its spread.

The fact that this attempt at sabotage has become a story within itself will probably only mean Brooker’s article will be read by more people, so the whole ruse has backfired.