Google Drops iNoodle.com's Jill Carroll-Related Web Pages
Does a recorded visit from the US Department of Justice in Washington, DC on January 13 (at 15:57:22 GMT) have anything to do with Google's apparent censoring of iNoodle.com? Someone at the DOJ visited iNoodle.com by way of a Google search on "jill carroll". As iNoodle.com regularly receives visits from US and UK government offices, established news bureaus and organizations, researchers at universities, worldwide, etc., I did not suspect that anything was amiss. But in light of my findings, below, I wonder.
By Sean M. Madden
Published on iNoodle.com
January 15, 2006 (22:28 GMT)
On Friday, January 13, a Google search on Jill Carroll resulted in an estimated 3.3 million hits. iNoodle.com coverage of the kidnapping and the subsequent news blackout was page-ranked in the first two to three pages (i.e., in the first 11 to 30 hits) of the resulting 3.3 million hits.
As of Sunday, January 15 (21:36 GMT), the same search results in an estimated 2.1 million hits. The latest iNoodle.com post is presently ranked #34, just after TIME.com's January 10th "The Abduction of Jill Carroll" article which has apparently been moved to a new web location.
So far so good.
Since January 10 when the Christian Science Monitor editors named Jill Carroll as the kidnapped journalist in question — that is, after they could no longer hold the two-day news blackout which they had orchestrated — visits had been regularly streaming in to the various iNoodle.com posts by way of Google searches performed on keywords related to the kidnapping and news blackout stories.
This was occurring well before the Slate article which cites iNoodle.com was published, on Thursday, January 12 at 19:38 ET (Jan 13, 00:38 GMT). Even after the Slate article had been published — and then re-published on Information Clearing House as per my submission to the ICH editor on Friday, January 13 — the majority of hits coming to the kidnapping- and news blackout-related posts on iNoodle.com stemmed from visitors' Google searches. Having had two articles published on ICH since the inception of the iNoodle.com blog on October 31, 2005, I am familiar with the site traffic which such publication can generate.
So when I awoke early yesterday, Saturday morning, I was surprised that I had not received more hits during the night, keeping in mind that US internet users tend to be active on iNoodle.com while most Britons and Europeans are sleeping, given the five-hour time difference between the UK and the East Coast and upwards to an eight-hour time difference with the West Coast. But, with ten years of website administration experience, I am also aware of the unpredictability of site traffic, and so was not particularly concerned.
Also, having worked round-the-clock much of last week, when a dear friend telephoned my wife and asked if we would like to go for a long walk on the Sussex Downs with her and her motley collection of dogs, we enthusiastically agreed. When we returned home around 17:30 GMT, I was even more surprised to see that iNoodle.com traffic had slowed considerably and that incoming Google searches had all but ceased.
This prompted my researching the situation throughout last night, until 06:45 this morning.
The upshot:
Every post which I had published on the kidnapping and news blackout story had been removed from Google's index database, as had all of the iNoodle.com daily-indexed archive files from January 7, the day of the abduction and the start of iNoodle.com's coverage of the story, through to today.
In short, what had previously been indexed and highly ranked no longer existed in Google. On the other hand, no posts unrelated to this story had been removed from Google, nor had any of the indexed archive files from before January 7. I spent the night collecting screen captures of various search results and other data to serve as evidence to prove this was the case. The results are in hand.
A little known Google command (site:http://inoodle.com/) which when executed generates a list of all of the pages of a particular website which reside in Google's index database proved my suspicions as I continued to work through the process of discovery. All of the iNoodle.com posts related to this story had been, for whatever reason, removed from Google's database.
I decided, last night, to republish each of the dropped posts without making any changes to the contents or to the metadata (e.g., headlines, date-time stamps) to see if this would cause Google to re-index the deleted pages.
By this afternoon, the iNoodle.com post of January 13, entitled "Jill Carroll Kidnapping: Slate Cites iNoodle.com — by Jack Shafer", had reappeared in the Google index, but none of the other related posts nor any of the archived pages since the day of the kidnapping and, therefore, the day I began coverage of the story have reappeared in Google.
I will continue to keep a close eye on this phenomenon, and to research the underlying cause. However, I decided to publish, herein, a brief narrative of the situation for two reasons: 1) to provide a publicly available record, and 2) to invite expertise and experience which others may like to share, either publicly on iNoodle.com by way of comments to this post or privately by way of email. My email address is sean@inoodle.com.
Related Links:
Does Google censor search results? [Google's answer in their own words]
"US Internet Censorship" article written by Wayne Madsen, and posted to iNoodle.com on December 12, 2005.
By Sean M. Madden
Published on iNoodle.com
January 15, 2006 (22:28 GMT)
On Friday, January 13, a Google search on Jill Carroll resulted in an estimated 3.3 million hits. iNoodle.com coverage of the kidnapping and the subsequent news blackout was page-ranked in the first two to three pages (i.e., in the first 11 to 30 hits) of the resulting 3.3 million hits.
As of Sunday, January 15 (21:36 GMT), the same search results in an estimated 2.1 million hits. The latest iNoodle.com post is presently ranked #34, just after TIME.com's January 10th "The Abduction of Jill Carroll" article which has apparently been moved to a new web location.
So far so good.
Since January 10 when the Christian Science Monitor editors named Jill Carroll as the kidnapped journalist in question — that is, after they could no longer hold the two-day news blackout which they had orchestrated — visits had been regularly streaming in to the various iNoodle.com posts by way of Google searches performed on keywords related to the kidnapping and news blackout stories.
This was occurring well before the Slate article which cites iNoodle.com was published, on Thursday, January 12 at 19:38 ET (Jan 13, 00:38 GMT). Even after the Slate article had been published — and then re-published on Information Clearing House as per my submission to the ICH editor on Friday, January 13 — the majority of hits coming to the kidnapping- and news blackout-related posts on iNoodle.com stemmed from visitors' Google searches. Having had two articles published on ICH since the inception of the iNoodle.com blog on October 31, 2005, I am familiar with the site traffic which such publication can generate.
So when I awoke early yesterday, Saturday morning, I was surprised that I had not received more hits during the night, keeping in mind that US internet users tend to be active on iNoodle.com while most Britons and Europeans are sleeping, given the five-hour time difference between the UK and the East Coast and upwards to an eight-hour time difference with the West Coast. But, with ten years of website administration experience, I am also aware of the unpredictability of site traffic, and so was not particularly concerned.
Also, having worked round-the-clock much of last week, when a dear friend telephoned my wife and asked if we would like to go for a long walk on the Sussex Downs with her and her motley collection of dogs, we enthusiastically agreed. When we returned home around 17:30 GMT, I was even more surprised to see that iNoodle.com traffic had slowed considerably and that incoming Google searches had all but ceased.
This prompted my researching the situation throughout last night, until 06:45 this morning.
The upshot:
Every post which I had published on the kidnapping and news blackout story had been removed from Google's index database, as had all of the iNoodle.com daily-indexed archive files from January 7, the day of the abduction and the start of iNoodle.com's coverage of the story, through to today.
In short, what had previously been indexed and highly ranked no longer existed in Google. On the other hand, no posts unrelated to this story had been removed from Google, nor had any of the indexed archive files from before January 7. I spent the night collecting screen captures of various search results and other data to serve as evidence to prove this was the case. The results are in hand.
A little known Google command (site:http://inoodle.com/) which when executed generates a list of all of the pages of a particular website which reside in Google's index database proved my suspicions as I continued to work through the process of discovery. All of the iNoodle.com posts related to this story had been, for whatever reason, removed from Google's database.
I decided, last night, to republish each of the dropped posts without making any changes to the contents or to the metadata (e.g., headlines, date-time stamps) to see if this would cause Google to re-index the deleted pages.
By this afternoon, the iNoodle.com post of January 13, entitled "Jill Carroll Kidnapping: Slate Cites iNoodle.com — by Jack Shafer", had reappeared in the Google index, but none of the other related posts nor any of the archived pages since the day of the kidnapping and, therefore, the day I began coverage of the story have reappeared in Google.
I will continue to keep a close eye on this phenomenon, and to research the underlying cause. However, I decided to publish, herein, a brief narrative of the situation for two reasons: 1) to provide a publicly available record, and 2) to invite expertise and experience which others may like to share, either publicly on iNoodle.com by way of comments to this post or privately by way of email. My email address is sean@inoodle.com.
Related Links:
Does Google censor search results? [Google's answer in their own words]
"US Internet Censorship" article written by Wayne Madsen, and posted to iNoodle.com on December 12, 2005.
posted by Sean M. Madden at
10:28 PM
)
1 Comments:
you amaze me... how can you tell the visit was from the DOJ? I obviously have a lot to learn...
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home