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How Google Searches Are Promoting Genocide Denial
merbs writes: If you use Google Turkey to search for "Ermeni Krm", which means "Armenian genocide" in Turkish, the first thing you'll see is a sponsored link to a website whose purpose is to deny there was any genocide at all. If you Google "Armenia genocide" in the U.S., you'll see the same thing. FactCheckArmenia.com may reflect Turkey's longstanding position that the Ottoman Empire's systematic effort to "relocate" and exterminate its Armenian population does not qualify as a genocide, but it certainly does not reflect the facts. The sponsored link to a credible-looking website risks confusing searchers about the true nature of the event. Worse, it threatens to poison a nascent willingness among Turkish citizens to recognize and discuss the horrors of its past.
Where the subject matter is not of a measurable or falsifiable nature, Google would have a third category, which flags pages with "Who gives a shit?".
When the secret documents of their cult appeared on the Usenet newsgroup 'alt.religion.scientology', the Internet awareness of their "galactic emperor Xenu killed the alian Thetans, and they have been reborn as all your bad thoughts" inner beliefs grew. But when they tried to censor the newsgroup, awareness *exploded*. Appalled at this and at the increasing rank of anti-scientology websites in Google, they created the largest website in the world. According to the former webmaster, Jurian Massena[sic?], the site had so *much* content that it actually crashed Google databases.
It was fascinating stuff: I met that webmaster after he left the cult. They simply did not care about the quality of the content on the website, they were just trying to flood the search engine, much as they tried to flood the alt.religion.scientology newsgroup with thousands of bulky messages a night. That led to a lot of Usenet sites dropping the newsgroup, because they couldn't handle the bulk. Over the course of six months while the attack was active, it was roughly half a Terabyte of spam.
Half a Terabyte: In 1999!!!!
It's described as "sporgery" in Wikipedia, it was a fascinating attack on free speech.