Thursday, July 19, 2007

Google Hiding Information For Bush?

Cliff Lyon, at One Utah, posted a new blog (Are We Under Martial Law NOW?) that has my attention. In fact, I decided to do some research on the information that he presents, because if he's right, I'm damn scared of our government right now, and you should be, too. Hopefully, I'll have my research posted soon, but for now, I want to point out something else I discovered.

Google has an Advanced Search feature that will allow you to search for pages that link to another page. So, if I wanted to find out if anyone has linked to a blog I have posted, I can put my link in that search box, and it will show me any pages they've found that link to it.

As an example of how this works, you can enter http://utahbloghive.org/, and you'll be taken here, to all the pages that link to Utah Bloghive.

So, I thought I'd check to see who else might have done analysis on Bush's Executive Order. I put the URL into Google's advanced search, and it came up empty. I had tried this a couple of days ago, and it came up empty on that one, too. Giving it the benefit of the doubt, I grabbed an old link from an Executive Order in May, so there would have been plenty of time for Google to find pages that link to it. That, too, came up empty.

I've always admired Google, but this is rather bothersome to me. Why can't they tell me who else might be linking to the page? Is it their policy, is there some type of law, did Bush just ask them not to?

If anyone has any further information on the reasons behind this, please let me know.