11-28-2008, 02:26 PM
I didn't click through because I didn't want to appear to be supporting her, and she may be a "nut", but I think it is worthwhile to be alert to the possibility that Google may be choosing to shuffle sites down the list because of their content. It seems plausible that there are innocent explanations for what has happened, but if Google really is deciding how to rank some sites based disproportionately on content that someone in power at Google doesn't like then that would be disturbing - even if at the moment it essentially amounts to "filtering" (not really cutting them out - just lowering them on the search lists) sites that I think are really lame. Google is a private enterprise and they have a lot of legal latitude about how they want to run their site, and there are good search sites that offer competition, but they are so pervasive that I would not like to see the kind of bias the woman cited has claimed.