The other day I did a piece on Donald Trump telling slain Border Patrol agent Brian Terry's brother he would "open the books on Fast and Furious."
That's significant news, as it has the potential to get answers that the House, Senate, courts and media have so far not been able to elicit. It also explains how this could be a campaign issue due to questions it opens up about the State Department's involvement while it was under Hillary.
The piece appeared on the news search results within moments of being published. Today it is gone.
Searching by article title, by my name and by Kent Terry's name yields no results.
This is the same kind of stuff that used to happen back in the days when Mike and I were the only ones reporting on gunwalking. It's hard to believe it's not directed, and that this was not an intentional removal.
Meanwhile, other "conservative" news outlets who have been asked to look into this story and determine the truth of it themselves have all seemingly gone into "not invented here" mode, and of course no "Authorized Journalists" are even going to learn about it now that it's removed from news search results.
In any case, the end result is the news is being suppressed. Disappeared.
This is why I ask regular readers here to take a moment and share links, with like-minded friends and with news sites they frequent. I'm asking it again, right now. Will you?
UPDATE: It looks like a lot of my recent stuff has been booted off, including this exclusive.
Once is happenstance...
UPDATE 2: Several people have contacted me to tell me they can find it. I said under the NEWS tab. That's the place stories recognized as newsworthy are placed, providing an advantage in terms of being noticed and picked up by other outlets and people looking for media sources as opposed to sources that don't meet the content guideline and authorship criteria.
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UPDATE 4: And it just disappeared again. Something is going on.
8 comments:
David Webb on Sirius/XM radios "Patriot Channel" was interviewing a woman last night who's been investigating things like this on both Facebook and Google.
It appears that Zuckerman might be willing to reverse the "official" Facebook stance on squelching conservative postings, but Google is so far down the rabbit hole that she had no hope for ever getting them back to where they used to be, a.k.a "Do No Evil".
I just did the search on google and found the link to ammoland. If it had not worked, then I was going to try the search on duckduck, but your point remains valid.
Again, a regular Google search works -- it is not showing up on a Google NEWS search. I don't know how else to explain it, but the issue is the NEWS search.
The thing is, by definition, the results from News searches is curated, unlike general search. So, many things could be happening, including the data the algorithms are using to determine if it's "news", whatever that means, changing from moment to moment. What you see also depends on Google's history of your searches.
We would be very surprised if Google is having a bunch of humans curating this like Facebook, that's just not in their DNA, plus their News has a much greater ambit. And unlike the explicitly political Facebook, Google search is their gem that leads to much if not most of their revenue, and perceptions of politically bias in search results would hit them much harder than Facebook is being hit right now. Search isn't very sticky, as Google demonstrated when it quickly supplanted AltaVista and all its other competitors.
As of this comment, with a "clean" browser (no cookies, trackers, etc.), a news.google.com search for the phrase "Donald Trump Promised Terry Brother" with no quotes shows a link to your AmmoLand article as the first result. The browser's IP address was from the central USA.
Sorry to hear about the visibility problems; hope it helps to see that your article doesn't seem to be completely blackballed for all google news searches/searchers.
It does that under the "All" tab, not the "News" tab. Curiously, the first hit goes to TTAG, which I used to write for, and they misspelled my name in the byline.
Anon @11:35AM again here. I just tried repeating the same search under the same circumstances as I did before, and now there are zero results for your article in the first dozen results pages for a google news search. (This is a different result from earlier today when a google news search - explicitly a news search - did return your AmmoLand article as the first result.)
I also am seeing the same results returned under the "All" tab as you mentioned in the previous comment: a TTAG page with your name misspelled.
"We would be very surprised"
Who's we, and how do you know it's not in their DNA?
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