Unlike today, if tech companies were generally run by conservatives, the liberal MSM would treat this like the Scandal Of The Decade.
As it stands, I can almost guarantee you this will be the only time you'll hear of it.
Enjoy the moment.
So to speak.
The other day, a commenter in one of my global warming articles (I wouldn't want to mention any names, but his initials are Z.A.C.H.R.I.E.L.) and I were discussing the issue and I asked him if some of the stuff coming out of the AGW debate wasn't just a little bit embarrassing for his side.
Me: How about the EPA declaring your breath is a toxic gas?
Z.A.C.H.R.I.E.L.: Animal respiration is carbon neutral.
Now, I will admit that he's half-right:
The intake part of your breath is carbon neutral.
But the exhalation? As every good-thinking, earth-hugging person knows, your exhalation is a deadly planet-killing toxic gas, verified by the greatest and most impartial collection of scientists on the planet, the respected (some might even say revered) Environmental Protection Agency.
So, wishing to fortify my point with a link, I cruised over to Google and did a search for "your breath is a toxic gas epa".
I came up with zip.
In the first 20 hits, I didn't come up with one article mocking how the EPA had just turned breath into a toxic gas. It was nothing but how bad, bad, bad that evil CO2 is for all living creatures and how the EPA is the only thing standing between you and being boiled alive by an angry rising sea.
Thinking this a tad strange, I went over to Bing and tried the exact same search. In the first 10 hits:
Your baby is a EPA polluter
Congressman Bill Shuster: Hold Your Breath, CO2 is now hazardous to your health
Junk Science: Breath Is Toxic Waste?
The next 10 hits yielded another three articles along the same lines, which is about what I had originally expected. Given the formidable opposition, getting 3 out of 10 links is probably doing pretty good.
Okay, so what about Google? Would you like to guess how many articles Google displayed before linking to an article that even remotely criticized the EPA's ruling?
137.
EPA Formally Declares CO2 a Dangerous Pollutant
And he was only criticizing the EPA ruling because he believed Cap & Trade was the better way to go.
Okay, so when does the first article appear on Google that outright mocks the EPA's ruling?
Link #228.
EPA declare carbon a toxic pollutant: Obama pulls end run
At the default 10 links per page, that's twenty-three pages you'd have to look through to see the other side of the story. You're welcome to do these searches yourself. The Bing link is here and the identical Google search is here.
We are actually witnessing an historic event in the making. Never before in 20 years of online search engines has a company actually been accused of egregious political bias in their search results. As businesses, sure, they put their liberalism on rampant display, like the way Google won't honor our fallen veterans on Memorial Day with a custom banner but is happy to honor the birthday of some 17th century Italian painter no one's ever heard of, nor shall we overlook that Bing is run by MicroSoft, the 'MS' part of 'MSNBC'. But for the search results to be so sanitized and censored, as the above puts on vivid display, is something brand new.
Twenty-three pages.
I might also point out that if I had searched for "co2 toxic gas epa", I wouldn't have been surprised at the results. But using the word 'breath' was specifically tailoring the search for the desired result.
Twenty-three pages.
The two burning questions now are:
1. What other areas have they sanitized?
2. Just how many people use this thing, again?
The latter, of course, is what turns this into an ethical crime; a crime against the common ethos. Regardless of a company's politics — and that's assuming a business enterprise should even have a 'politics' — we still expect a product such as this to be a fair, impartial algorithmic look at what's out there. If they want to tweak the algorithm so it places articles that use the word "Democrat" more than the word "Republican" above articles that do the opposite, fine. All's fair in love, war and politics.
But this is far beyond a mere tweak. Google has knowingly violated the public trust.
Twenty-three pages.
If the next AGW-busting article on Climate Depot or Watts Up With That ends up on page fifty-eight, don't be surprised.
The March weather is continuing its schizophrenic pattern, with days of well above freezing days followed by a batch of below freezing days, thrown in with snow that falls during both the above freezing and below freezing days. I...
Tracked: Mar 17, 23:09