Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said gathering more personal data was a key way for Google to expand and the company believes that is the logical extension of its stated mission to organise the world’s information.
Big Brother is now selling for 475.860 USD, up five dollars from yesterday. Maybe the idea of having a personal secretary appeals to some:
Google’s ambition to maximise the personal information it holds on users is so great that the search engine envisages a day when it can tell people what jobs to take and how they might spend their days off.
This brings the concept of dumbing things down to a new level:
Asked how Google might look in five years’ time, Mr Schmidt said: “We are very early in the total information we have within Google. The algorithms will get better and we will get better at personalisation.
“The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’“
The race to accumulate the most comprehensive database of individual information has become the new battleground for search engines as it will allow the industry to offer far more personalised advertisements. These are the holy grail for the search industry, as such advertising would command higher rates.
Mr Schmidt told journalists in London: “We cannot even answer the most basic questions because we don’t know enough about you. That is the most important aspect of Google’s expansion.”
This is truly creepy. Somehow, though, I don’t think the leftists who fight governmental collection of information are going to put up a fight. After all, Google’s owners are solidly in the Dhimmi camp.
I don’t go to Google for news much; they seem to leave out what I’m looking for. The American Thinker reported on this a year ago:
Something frighteningly ominous has been happening on the Internet lately: Google, without any prior explanation or notice, has been terminating its News relationship with conservative e-zines and web journals.
At first blush, one can easily ignore such business decisions by the most powerful company on the Internet as being routine. However, on closer examination, such behavior could give one relatively small (when measured by the size of its workforce) technology corporation a degree of political might that frankly dwarfs even its current financial prowess.
It’s Not So Easy Being A Conservative E-Zine
As reported by NewsBusters, the most recent occurrence of this unexplained phenomenon was Friday, May 19, when Frank Salvato, proprietor of The New Media Journal, realized that his content that day hadn’t been disseminated at Google News as it had been on a daily basis since he reached an agreement with the search engine in September 2005.
After sending the Google Help Desk a query concerning the matter, Salvato was informed that there had been complaints of “hate speech” at his website, and as a result, The New Media Journal would no longer be part of Google News. As evidence of his offense, the Google Team supplied Salvato with links to three recent op-eds published by his contributing writers, all coincidentally about radical Islam and its relation to terrorism.
Unfortunately, this was not the first conservative e-zine to be terminated in such a fashion. On March 29, Rusty Shackleford, owner of The Jawa Report, received a similar e-mail message as Salvato informing him that:
‘Upon recent review, we’ve found that your site contains hate speech, and we will no longer be including it in Google News.’
For those unfamiliar, The Jawa Report focuses a great deal of attention on terrorist issues and how they relate to radical Islam.
Two weeks after Jawa was cut from Google News, Jim Sesi’s MichNews.com was banished on April 12. In Sesi’s case, the three pieces provided as examples of ‘hate speech’ were articles by conservative writer J. Grant Swank, Jr., all about — you guessed it — radical Islam and terrorism.
And since Google acquired You Tube, the bias is even more blatant. Here is the AT essay from October of last year:
As reported by American Thinker on May 22, Internet search king Google eliminated a number of conservative e-zines and blogs from its news crawl earlier this year. In all of the cases cited, the alleged offense was the dissemination of ‘hate speech.’
After closer examination, the tie between all the banished websites was the publishing of articles about radical Islam and its relation to international terrorism. Yet, sites that actually were more specifically involved in such activities — like Hezb’allah’s propaganda arm in Lebanon, al Manar — were unaffected by Google’s ‘hate speech’ policies, and continue to be a part of its news crawl.
- - - - - - - - - -
The Liberal Bias Virus: Coming Soon to a Computer Near You
Now, five months later, the web’s leading video-sharing portal YouTube has been implicated for demonstrating a similar hypocrisy in its business practices. In the past several weeks, some leading conservative websites have had videos pulled and their accounts closed. As Robert Cox of the Washington Examiner reported on October 12,
Enter Fox News pundit, author and top-rated blogger Michelle Malkin. Last week she received notice from YouTube, the world’s most popular video sharing service, that her video had been deemed ‘offensive.’ The result? Her account may be terminated and her videos deleted.
YouTube refused to say why her videos were ‘offensive’ and there was no avenue available to challenge the decision. Today, her videos are gone and her voice is suppressed on the most important video ‘node’ on the Internet.
What was the content of the offending video? You guessed it —radical Islam. As Michelle Malkin posted at her website on October 4,
Back in February, you may remember, I cobbled together a little mini-movie called “First, They Came,” inspired by the Mohammed Cartoon riots. It’s a simple slideshow highlighting the victims of Islamic violence over the years.
Yet, much like the seeming double-standard employed by Google, the folks at YouTube are only offended by those speaking out against radical Islamic terrorism, not those supporting it. As reported by the Honolulu Star-Bulletin on September 13,
The wildly popular video-sharing Web site YouTube.com has dozens of videos purporting to show individual American soldiers being killed in Iraq, in what amounts to snuff films, overlaid with music and insurgent slogans.
Some of the videos, including ones of American soldiers purportedly being picked off by snipers or being blown up by improvised explosive devices, have been viewed tens of thousands of times each in the past few months. Some are posted in YouTube’s “news and blogs” category, but others are listed under “entertainment” and even “comedy.”
However, YouTube doesn’t seem to be exclusively disturbed by anti-terrorist messages. NewsBusters reported on October 10 that a video posted by conservative film producer David Zucker poking fun at what the Clinton administration did to prevent North Korea from acquiring nuclear weapons in the ‘90s was censored by the web-video portal.
Democratic YouTube viewers used the site’s software to “flag” the video as “inappropriate,” a designation usually reserved for extremely violent or sexually explicit video clips. There is nothing even remotely sexual or violent in the clip. The closest thing to an explicit image in the ad is a scene in which Albright bends over and her skirt tears a bit in the seat, hardly the stuff that sets FCC commissioners’ hearts aflutter.
While you can still view the video if you watch it embedded on another web site, if you try to watch it on YouTube, you’ll be greeted with the message: “This video may contain content that is inappropriate for some users, as flagged by YouTube’s user community. To view this video, please verify you are 18 or older by logging in or signing up.”
Hmmm…Google wants to organize my life while eliminating any nasty news about
And the demonic convergence of Google, Soros, and the Dem MSM is disquieting. I wonder when we’ll get our nastygram regarding our blog content? Probably not until our numbers approach those of Michelle Malkin or Jawa Report.
By the way, the latter has a video clip of Al-Qaeda’s paean to jihad martyr Dadullah:
Al-Qaeda spokesman Ayman al-Zawahiri eulogizes Dadullah as a “hero of jihad in this era and a knight among its knights.”
This video is from Live Leak, which is obviously taking up what Google rejects.
5 comments:
This is scary, though not terribly surprising. I wonder if they have a "diversity team" trained by CAIR.
It ties in with the rest of the web though. If you're a liberal crying out for the killing of Bush/Cheney/et al, that's permissable. If you are a conservative criticising hillary/Kerry/Obama, then you are guilty of hate speech.
The nice thing about "the internet", which is really just a fancy name for everybody's-computer-being-accessible is that it sort of has talk radio built in.
Google doesn't crawl the desired websites? No problem. Launch a more inclusive or more precisely targetted search engine.
The desire for big organizations to act the way we (whoever "we" might be) want them to is utopian and childish.
Big organizations always have and always will do whatever they think will make them bigger, rightly or wrongly. It is the way of the world.
Google hence has no problem collaborating with ChiCom fascists in suppressing their population or jihaddis and their apologists in seizing control of the terms of the popular discourse.
Get used to it.
Build alternatives.
Accept the realities around us. There are real enemies with real agendas and real useful-idiots and fifth columnists to help them.
It gets worse. It doesn't change. Fight or lose.
Joe said:
Get used to it.
Build alternatives.
Accept the realities around us. There are real enemies with real agendas and real useful-idiots and fifth columnists to help them.
It gets worse. It doesn't change. Fight or lose.
That's exactlywhat we're doing, Joe. Why don't you join in the effort at Center for Vigilant Freedom.
Your sentiments would be most welcome and your efforts appreciated by all the members. It's reached an international level now.
And writing about the situation, as we do at Gates, is a way of fighting it.
You reminded me I have a post to finish on corruption in China. It's so large and so endemic to that country that it's almost hard to talk about.
I dirve by the Google HQ every now and again, it used to belong and was built-by Silicon Graphics, when they were a hot-stock at the beginning of the Web - AlGore even gave a speech in the bldg to the SGI employees, commending them on builing his Internet.
Google has expanded the scene to include a campus of other nearby buildings that emptied when the dot-com bloom withered. Young Googletrons (there are visibly no old Google employees - everyone is of about the same youthful age-range) wander to and fro, walking straight out into the street talking on cell-phones or using some internet device, totally oblivious or so entitled that traffic doesn't concern them and must simply part for them like Moses at the Red Sea.
It's totally Aldous Huxley.
What an outstanding opportunity for Yahoo to come roaring back. If conservatives, who number about 30-40% of the population, knew that Yahoo would have the more conservative ideas they seek, they would leave Google to the left and Yahoo would have an assured future. That is not how the world of marketing typically works: they go after the same slightly larger pile of people (plurality) and leave the majority in the dust.
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