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Dec. 4, 2016 - Clif High
12:12
Warning to Woo-Woo! Google's War against Words!
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Hello humans.
It's 1 p.m.
Sunday, December 4th, 2016.
Quick little discussion here for people that are in the woo-woo business or and even the alternative media business in general as well as the what they are calling alt-right media.
Google has redone their search algorithms for their presentation of results with the intent of servicing, as they say, sites that have trusted content.
Now I don't want to get into the details of it because it's a huge can of worms.
When you start getting into Google's algorithms for how they uh deal with search, how they deal with trusted sites and all of this other sort of thing.
There's a lot of machine learning involved, a lot of um uh expert system stuff that goes on, and they are uh uh well within the rights to do all of this.
Now uh uh as the premier search engine quasi utility one might say at a global level, not just merely a country level, uh they have a certain uh responsibility to let their audience and their uh especially their advertisers know uh what's going on.
So this particular uh discussion here relates to anybody that's advertising in what I would refer to as the woo-woo world, which is UFOs, officially uh denied stuff, uh totally unknown.
Uh basically, if you're in woo-woo, uh you know it, and uh if you don't, and you question whether you are, you probably are.
So anyway, um if you're in the woo-woo business, you'll notice that uh, as I have, that your the number of uh people visiting your pages and therefore any advertising revenue hooked to that page or any um views to the content of that page and so on are going to be down.
The reason they're down is because Google has redone their search algorithm to service trusted sites, what they're calling trusted news.
Their trust algorithms and how they um determine this is a very complex subject, not going to be discussed here at the moment.
Uh what I wanted to say though was that since the um uh uh abysmal performance of um uh Hillary Clinton in the election, the uh media and everyone else is casting around blame like mad and those institutions that are in the blame chain direction uh are uh doing everything they can to cover their ass.
And so uh they've decided that uh alt-right or fake news uh has got to go, and so what they're doing is they've altered their uh algorithms for search.
Now Google's response to this is not to ban sites, it's not to even particularly lower your uh rating in their search engines.
Uh rather, what it does appear to be is that if you're in these particular categories of the um uh alt-right or and then the woo-woo UFOs, you know, officially denied, that sort of thing, which is attached to the alt-right, uh, or if you're into the alternative media, which surrounds both of those areas, you'll notice that your page uh views are way down and ever since the 9th of November.
Uh it appears in the last um seven, eight days maybe, maybe a little longer than that.
Uh some changes were put into place that tightened it up a little bit.
This is the way Google does things.
They don't just come on in and flip switches, so to speak, they come on in and ratchet down a little bit, see how it works, ratchet down a little more, see how it works.
So they've got their own internal feedback loops to prevent things from getting out of whack.
Uh because they easily could, especially if you're doing a lot of stuff with machine learning and um uh uh expert system technology with uh that has the potential of just spinning out of control on its own, as they all do.
So um what they've done in the search engine uh world is to cue up presentations that favor their version of trusted sources.
So uh in the background, they may be delivering their unfiltered search the way that they would normally do it, and in my way of thinking, what they've done is they've put a um uh display filter on that accommodates their need to service the trusted sources.
So you'll notice that in a search that was done uh prior To the election here in the USA pop that might have yielded what they consider to be fake news and it would have popped that up in the first 10.
So within the top 10 results, may have included frequently places like Twitter, less so Instagram, Steemit, Reddit, a few of these other social media, the minor social media.
And now that same search executed today, and I've done this, I don't have a screenshot of the results from prior to the election, but because of the nature of my work, I have to re uh repeatedly perform uh searches in order to build up particular kinds of databases, and as a result of which I piggyback on Google, why should I do it all myself?
And as a result of which I know that these searches have changed.
Now they should change, there's no question about that.
Uh a search should change with the frequency of the updating of the Google database that provides the results for that uh search.
However, it shouldn't change so much that seven or eight out of the top ten are no longer there, and that seven or eight include the major minor uh social media such as Twit it, Reddit, and Steemit.
Uh and they're just gone, they're just replaced.
Uh so uh it shouldn't be that um wholesale that things should have shifted in this minor period of time of the I think it was 48 days, 49 days between these two searches.
And the search is innocuous, it's not in an area of of a lot of uh hot bed of activity, but it is in an area, and the search was phrased such that you would bring up the uh alt right and or woo-woo sites uh in the top 50 uh search results uh back before the election, and now that's not the case.
So if you're in the woo-woo world, if you're um uh in the um alt media world that is in some way linguistically connected to the alt right, or you've used some of the same words, you may find yourself in a situation where uh your your uh hits on your page are down uh appreciably over 18-20%, and that's so far.
And uh as I say, Google likes to ratchet these things down over time rather than just simply flip a switch when they think the algorithm works.
You know, they're not stupid, they want to make sure that this stuff happens in the way that they anticipate before they go full bore on it.
Now they're not stupid, but things get past them all the time, uh, such as their own copyright logo on their own um ad words showing up sometimes and sometimes not.
Now that one I've got uh screen captures on, uh so I can prove that thing.
Uh but like in this last one, uh the results that used to uh bring up these sites, Twitter, especially it's gone out of there, um in this particular search before election and then after election, no Twitter, uh you know, uh there's even an Instagram in the top 50 in the pre election, now none of them, but the real kicker on this is there's also no YouTube.
I had had two YouTube um organic results, not ads, but organic results within the uh second page of this search back before election, and now they don't even appear.
So Google sort of sh you know screwing themselves uh as well because they own YouTube.
So this is just at least that's my understanding.
So uh so that's gone.
Um it's very interesting the way that they did this.
Uh as I've uh been informed, um Google is not admitting that they've done anything like this.
Uh they've said that they will do this, they're committed to doing it, but they're not talking about any specifics about any of this kind of thing.
Uh I haven't gone and talked to Google, I haven't asked them uh directly, so this is just uh secondhand information, but uh the the results I've been able to see.
Google hasn't said that they've done any of it, but nonetheless, I'm able to see it out there.
And then I went and I tracked uh results on my own site and I tracked results on a number of the legitimate woo woo site, you know, um a site that talks about Mars and um uh UFOs, and uh their results are way down.
And uh so uh and they were actually a fairly popular Mars and UFO site, and so uh among bunches of others uh there were that are in the woowoo world, but I have to usually isolate with my own um materials so I don't get caught up in the stuff that's going on in those in the fora that are attached to those sites.
And so uh all of these places their results are way down over the last um uh couple of weeks.
Uh and uh statistically it's just odd that all of these people in what I would consider an alt-right or attached to the alt-right category find that their uh search rate response displays are down such that it's this feeding loop,
and thus the um uh people searching and finding their site go down, therefore the next time you hunt to look for that same kind of stuff, you don't even bother to to uh uh go at their site because they weren't displayed the first time, and they don't even come up in the search, and so it it spirals on down.
Um anyway, just a bit of warning to the people in Woowoo that may think that they're um being tarnished by a very broad brush of fake news.
Uh and maybe maybe somebody needs to uh form a you know um uh a woo-woo union uh so as and go in, you know, and go and talk to Google and say, hey fellas, you know, uh this basically isn't fair.
Get your algorithm so it targets people specifically, you know, we're into the you know, um uh big space goat farts kind of stuff and not the alt-right, and therefore shouldn't be uh hassled by your uh fake news algorithm because we weren't echoing the Russians, you know, and we think the Russians are whatever the hell, um, you know, supported by space aliens, etc.
etc.
etc.
So, or maybe you know, at the same time that they're dealing with the alt-right, they just decided to shovel the woo-woo guys in there to just get rid of them because they're a pain in the ass.
It's difficult to categorize somebody, you know, and some of the the belief systems that come out within Google's uh uh database and and algorithms.
So hopefully just a quick little um video here to let you know if you're in the woo-woo business, you need to think about uh upping your advertising or whatever to uh compensate for uh the fact that they're gonna basically ratchet down that that um uh valve on the search engine results and uh your results and your hits and your views and your revenues are gonna go down,
uh probably on the order of uh down to zero if it if they can do it because they're trying to eliminate a whole category of um uh websites from their the purview of uh humans because they don't want humans to have this information.
They're scared of words and thoughts.
I know, I know it's really sad.
Poor Google.
Uh they're very scared of words, uh, they're very scared of thoughts that you know are not approved for them by their masters, and um, you know, we can't do much about it.
Uh they're not really adults, uh they don't really understand the world in which they're operating.
They're simply slaves to their um the idea of the corporate mindset and don't understand what it is to be human.
So but you know, within those parameters, we can feel sorry for them.
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