by ANDRE DAMON
PHOTO/Independent
An intensive review of Internet data has established that Google has severed links between the World Socialist Web Site and the 45 most popular search terms that previously directed readers to the WSWS. The physical censorship implemented by Google is so extensive that of the top 150 search terms that, as late as April 2017, connected the WSWS with readers, 145 no longer do so.
These findings make clear that the decline in Google search traffic to the WSWS is not the result of some technical issue, but a deliberate policy of censorship. The fall took place in the three months since Google announced on April 25 plans to promote “authoritative web sites” above those containing “offensive” content and “conspiracy theories.”
Because of these measures, the WSWS’s search traffic from Google has fallen by two-thirds since April.
The WSWS has analyzed tens of thousands of search terms, and identified those key phrases and words that had been most likely to place the WSWS on the first or second page of search results. The top 45 search terms previously included “socialism,” “Russian revolution,” “Flint Michigan,” “proletariat,” and “UAW [United Auto Workers].” The top 150 results included the terms “UAW contract,” “rendition” and “Bolshevik revolution.” All of these terms are now blocked.
In a set of guidelines issued to Google evaluators in March, elaborated in April by Google VP of Engineering Ben Gomes, the company instructed its search evaluators to flag pages returning “conspiracy theories” or “upsetting” content unless “the query clearly indicates the user is seeking an alternative viewpoint.” The changes to the search rankings of WSWS content are consistent with such a mechanism.
Users of Google will be able to find the WSWS if they specifically include “World Socialist Web Site” in their search request. But if their inquiry simply includes term such as “Trotsky,” “Trotskyism,” “Marxism,” “socialism” or “inequality,” they will not find the site.
More than 90 percent of Google search users do not click on results past the first page, and over 99 percent do not click on links past the 10th page. This means that if a result is demoted beyond the first 100 results, it is effectively unreachable.
The new figures are based on a detailed analysis of the WSWS’s top 30,000 search terms, compiled by the SEMRush search optimization software and checked against Google’s own data as well as Google searches.
Despite repeated attempts to contact Google’s press office, the company continues to refuse to comment on the facts revealed by the WSWS’s investigation.
But the WSWS’s coverage, which has been widely shared and referenced by other independent news outlets, has brought substantial attention to the role of Google’s so-called evaluators.
In a live webcast Wednesday, John Mueller, a webmaster trends analyst at Google, was asked whether these evaluators could affect “web site reputation.” Mueller gave what could only be called a non-denial denial, declaring that the actions of evaluators “could theoretically include something like reputation of a web site in general.”
This was effectively an admission that Google’s army of censors has the capability to blackball individual sites by demoting their “reputation.”
The list of search terms blocked by Google indicate what the government and corporate oligarchy do not want the population to know about.
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