I want Google to have a monopoly. There’s a reason people use it. They do things right.
Alex on February 9, 2009 10:23 AM
My site was sandboxed by Google for our political content. Overnight we vanished off the internet map, as if we had never existed.
Today I was talking to a major supplier for my business, and he said it’s been well known Google will sandbox or sideline sites with a perceived anti-obama bias. That’s astounding to me, and scary
I would not believed it had it not happened to me, but after posting one admittedly thought provoking article unflatering to the president, which was getting plenty of hits and attempts at malicious spam comments (which we blocked) we suddenly fell off the google radar.
Our readership went from 500 visits a day to less than 10 within 3 days. When I look at my stats in SiteMeter I want to cry. It looks like a cliff dive, and we changed nothing about what we do or how we post.
If we had been depending on that traffic to sell ads, we would be sunk, and many more conservative websites have been.
I too thought there was nothing wrong with Google’s virtual monopoloy, because I assumed they were clean and fair…LOL. Sure, just the way Fox news is ‘fair and balanced’ it turns out.
It is extremely dangerous to have something as essential as an internet search engine be dominated by a company willing to use their position to exercise their pollitical points of view and police free speech.
After it happened to me, I realized they don’t even need to shut you down…they just need to make you invisible, like pulling the card for a book out of a library’s catalogue drawer, but leaving the book on the shelf. You get to claim the book is still available, although no one would think to search for it, or have any idea where it was located.
I cannot understand how individuals who were aghast at George Bush’s moves to silence free speech, tacitly condone this kind of behavior because it’s “right” and being done by their side.