With 85% of the search engine market, Google has a dominant position on the Internet. It is in the enviable position of having its brand name become a verb - i.e. to "google" something. So, it's a bit disturbing to hear the claim that it's using its market domination to promote a certain ideological viewpoint.
Yet, that claim has been made. Google the term googlegate. (No, I didn't make that up.) Now enter the term googlegate in the Bing search engine. Did you notice the number of results returned? I got 29,700 in Google vs. a whopping 82.7 million in Bing. Do the same with climategate. My numbers show 1.7 million in Google vs. 63.8 million in Bing. Why the difference?
Well, according to many bloggers and most recently Lawrence Solomon in the Financial Post, it's evidence that Google is manipulating the results to suppress contrary views on climate change. Hence the term googlegate, which, supposedly Google is also suppressing.
Now, it seems odd to me that a company with a market cap of $183 billion would risk its credibility to suppress a few conspiracy theories. So I did a bit of testing myself. On a hunch, I tried schoolhouse. Google returned 4.2 million results. Bing returned 1.2 billion results. Bingo (excuse the pun). I tried springgate. No, I don't know what a springgate is either but Bing found an astounding 72 million results. Google found just 47,500. Finally runtime returned 605 million results in Bing compared to 37 million in Google. Maybe there's no conspiracy at all. Maybe the two search engines just work differently.
I love a good conspiracy theory as much as anyone but it pays to be careful. Things can seem plausible at first until you look behind the curtain.
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Saturday, January 2, 2010
The Global Warming Debate - A Test for Homo Sapiens
By now, just about everyone in the blog universe has written something on Climate Change. Believer, skeptic, denier; whatever camp you fit into, you're probably getting pretty tired of the debate itself. Kyoto was a partial success that turned into a failure. Copenhagen was a circus that not only failed to achieve results but actually added 46 thousand tonnes of carbon dioxide. (Compare that with the republic of Chad where 11 million people contributed less than 400 thousand tonnes of CO2 in the entire year of 2006).
I've tried to follow the debate and all I've gotten is confused. Hockey sticks, ice cores, ice sheets shrinking (or are they expanding), temperature charts, the medieval warm period - after a while it all becomes a blur of claims and counter-claims. And don't get me started on the personal attacks. The scientists who support the theory of anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming know that they must do so to keep the government research funding going. And of course those who don't are a bunch of industry shills and right-wing economists. So, it's understandable that people tune out the whole debate.
Understandable, yes, but not desireable. At some future point, scientists and historians are going to look back on this debate and pronounce one group right, or at least more right than the other. To me, though, it hardly matters whether AGW turns out to be hype generated by alarmist scientists or a prudent warning ignored by economists and industry-backed hacks. What really matters is the quality of public debate. And that hasn't been pretty.
What's undeniable but not widely discussed is that our species is capable of doing things that have marked impacts on the biosphere. Our ability to affect the carrying capacity of the planet increases with each technological advance, with each economic expansion and with each new birth. We have been running into planetary limits (such as global fish stocks) for decades but it's been confined to the economic margins so far. Limiting CO2 is the first time we've had to deal with a planetary limit that would seriously affect economic growth. The viability of our species will ultimately depend on whether we are capable of dealing with these limits in a way that avoids armed conflict. Because even if CO2 proves not to be the serious hazard that many believe, there will be something else.
I've tried to follow the debate and all I've gotten is confused. Hockey sticks, ice cores, ice sheets shrinking (or are they expanding), temperature charts, the medieval warm period - after a while it all becomes a blur of claims and counter-claims. And don't get me started on the personal attacks. The scientists who support the theory of anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming know that they must do so to keep the government research funding going. And of course those who don't are a bunch of industry shills and right-wing economists. So, it's understandable that people tune out the whole debate.
Understandable, yes, but not desireable. At some future point, scientists and historians are going to look back on this debate and pronounce one group right, or at least more right than the other. To me, though, it hardly matters whether AGW turns out to be hype generated by alarmist scientists or a prudent warning ignored by economists and industry-backed hacks. What really matters is the quality of public debate. And that hasn't been pretty.
What's undeniable but not widely discussed is that our species is capable of doing things that have marked impacts on the biosphere. Our ability to affect the carrying capacity of the planet increases with each technological advance, with each economic expansion and with each new birth. We have been running into planetary limits (such as global fish stocks) for decades but it's been confined to the economic margins so far. Limiting CO2 is the first time we've had to deal with a planetary limit that would seriously affect economic growth. The viability of our species will ultimately depend on whether we are capable of dealing with these limits in a way that avoids armed conflict. Because even if CO2 proves not to be the serious hazard that many believe, there will be something else.
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