Yes, Google has bowed to the Cult of Scientology, removing links to Operation Clambake, the pre-eminent anti-Scientology website, from its directory. You cannot find any reference to it by searching for the word ‘scientology’. Why? The DMCA. The CoS threatened legal action if Google didn’t stop linking to sites that spread copyrighted religious material. Yes, you read right. The Cult of Scientology has copyrighted all of its religious material and will use the DMCA to prevent people from being critical of it. The Cultists have no concept of Fair Use, and neither do our courts, anymore.
This comes after the CoS had managed to artificially raise the Google-assigned relevance (PageRank) of its pages by obssessively cross-linking them. My first link explains in some detail how they did it (scroll down to the pictures). Basically, Google assigns PageRank based on how many other pages that meet the same criteria link to a given page. By maniacally cross-linking, the CoS has managed to artificially inflate the scores of its own pages and, by the same token, deflate the scores of those that criticize it.
Google is still the best, technically-speaking. It is owned, however, by a bunch of goddamned collaborators who deserve nothing but contempt. Link to Operation Clambake!
The Daily Rotten story where the morons.org page points to claims that “The search engine Google is censoring the Internet’s leading critic of the Church of Scientology, Operation Clambake. The site has been completely removed from the search engine and from the Google Directory, which uses data from the Open Directory Project, DMOZ.”
I just went to Google and searched for “scientology clambake” and the first hit was for a www.xenu.net page. So it would appear that the article is either outdated or just plain wrong.
I went to the morons.org article and scanned down the viewer comments. They point out that the article states that Operation Clambake had been removed from the Google Directory, but this doesn’t affect the Search engine.
It might be a subtle thing (I’m sure more folks use the search engine), but it’s still disgusting. I’ve done many searches on various engines for material critical of the CoS, where I’ve been inundated with the Church’s own sites. They’re evidently trying to prevent access to critical sites.
I searched for Clambake and xenu.net did show up as the first return in Google.
I then search for $cientology and almost everything was either pro $cientology or strictly “information”. However on the 4th page of the search results a linkXenu.net in Italian showed up. I should point out that my knowledge of Italian is very, very limited, so I don’t know if that site is anti-$cientology or not.
“scientology critical” in the Search Engine just gave me at least 4 opponent links (including Scientology Lies and the Canadian site for Xenu) in the first page, among other, favorable sites. The ElRons raise the listing rank of their own sites and try to drown out the visibility of their critics’ through the use of “googlebombs” – embedding the most common search phrases into numerous mutual links betwen their own sites.
Apparently what Google has removed are direct links to Xenu from Google’s own directory section – still a display of rank wussness; but by now entirely unsurprising coming from corporate America.
And BTW, way to fucking go, distinguished gentlemen who approved the DMCA.
The very use of the word “Xenu” should be a tipoff that this is a site critical of scientology. “Xenu” is one of those embarassing aspects of the scientology fairy tale that they’d just as soon not mention or let be known.
I think the point is this. If you did a google search for “scientology” xenu.net would come up as the fourth link, now it won’t come up in the regular links at all as a result of that search.
Yep, it says ‘Google pulls anti-Scientology links’. It’s from CNET. Google has acknowledged the negative press and decided that it isn’t worth losing business over a bunch of loony cultists.
In other words, reason has prevailed. This is proof that the open market can fix problems like these much better than legal action. The clams threatened with the law, we threatened with horrible, horrible press, and we won.
I want to state something for the record: I posted the OP at around 0100 MST (or 0800 GMT), and it was true and (relatively) recent news at the time. The problem had been resolved after this thread was started.
So don’t look at me like I’m an idiot (any more than you already do). I was doing some late-night surfing and came across something I could not let stand, which I verified at the time. Changes after the fact could not be reflected in my OP.
