I’m off of Google. Google is no longer a verb in my vocabulary.

When introduced years ago as an alternative to Yahoo!, it was good. It was much better than Yahoo! And for a while it was the de facto standard for searching the Internet. However, recent revelations have me believe that Google is seriously censoring and filtering the search results, and as a free-thinking, freedom of speech advocate, I can no longer support such an institution.

From Lawrence Solomon’s column Better off with Bing comes this:

Sometime around then, in early December, Google began to minimize the Climategate scandal by hiding Climategate pages from its users. By Dec. 17, the number of climategate pages that a Google search found dropped by almost 10 million, to 22.2 million. One day later Google dropped its find by another 8 million pages, to 14.1 million. By Dec. 23, Google could find only 7.5 million hits and on Dec. 24 just 6 million. And yesterday, when I checked, Google reported a mere 1.8 million climategate pages.

Bing, in contrast, didn’t make climategate pages disappear. As you’d expect from a search engine that wasn’t manipulating data, search results on Bing climbed steadily until they peaked at around 51 million, where they have remained since.

And he goes on to say:

But suddenly in late November, for reasons known only to Google, Google often would not suggest “climategate” to those who keyed in c-l-i. Even c-l-i-m-a or c-l-i-m-a-t-e-g-a-t weren’t enough to solicit a suggestion. Bing, in contrast, did not and does not steer users away from climategate — it has consistently suggested “climategate” to those who keyed in c-l-i or even c-l.

and:

Why would Google want to tamp down interest in climategate? Money and power could have something to do with it. Search for Google and its founders and you’ll see that they have made big financial bets on global warming through investments in renewable and other green technologies; that they have a close relationship with Al Gore, that Google CEO Eric Schmidt is close to Barack Obama.

So, as much as I don’t like Microsoft (as a user), I am banning Google, and switching to Bing for my main search engine. They are not filtering any search results, and are not pushing any political agenda.

Anyone who is against nanny-states and relishes in free-thinking should do the same, but of course, as a free-thinking, freedom of speech advocate I cannot tell you what to do… You’ll have to decide that for yourself.

Just do some research (not on Google, they even filter out “Googlegate”…)

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