…it aint news.
Case in point:
Three terrorists commit suicide while in custody at Gitmo and the MSM is all over it like white on rice.
Yet Cuba having a suicide rate double that of the rest of Latin America, with Cuban women garnering the highest suicide rate of women in the world and for the MSM, mum’s the word.
The following is the response I received from Google when I inquired about the organization of websites on Google’s search results for Santiago Alvarez and Osvaldo Mitat. (The first three pages of results are from Granma and assorted Communist/hard-left publications.)
Hi Robert,
Thank you for your reply. We really understand your concern and as we mentioned in our previous emails, Google simply aggregates information already published on the web. Sites’ positions in our search results are determined automatically based on a number of factors, which are explained in more detail at http://www.google.com/technology/index.html. We don’t manually assign keywords to sites, nor do we manipulate the ranking of any site in our search results.
The following is copied from http://www.google.com/technology/index.html.
The heart of our software is PageRank™, a system for ranking web pages developed by our founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University. And while we have dozens of engineers working to improve every aspect of Google on a daily basis, PageRank continues to provide the basis for all of our web search tools.
PageRank Explained
PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”
Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.
Integrity
Google’s complex, automated methods make human tampering with our results extremely difficult. And though we do run relevant ads above and next to our results, Google does not sell placement within the results themselves (i.e., no one can buy a higher PageRank). A Google search is an easy, honest and objective way to find high-quality websites with information relevant to your search.
I remain skeptical.