Donald Johnson sent me this note:
I visit Norman Finkelstein's site about once a week. I usually get there by googling his name and then clicking. That didn't work yesterday, because apparently Google no longer provides links to Norman's site. I don't know what the explanation is, but it is kind of interesting.
Agreed; I wonder. (Finkelstein's out of town.)
I checked this as well and got the same result. This is very curious.
I have never known google to suddenly "lose" all references to a specific website before.
I used to see his site on google. i just tried it. it should come us as the first listing when you post a search like 'normanfinkelstein.com' but it did not. i think this is being done by the same group of people that are pressuring youTube to remove videos that are critical to Israel.
BluePearl
Would that group be Camera?
if you go to yahoo.com right now and put in 'norman finkelstein' or 'normanfinkelstein.com' it is the first listing as it should be and as it used to be with google. i guess google got to practice and perfect censoring by working with the chinese.
here are search engines that are censoring norm's website
ask.com
google.com
the following are not censoring the website.
search.live.com
dogpile.com
altavista.com
excite.com
webcrawler.com
metacrawler.com
I just tried it, too. Very strange. I just used to enter "finkelstein" and his website would be the first one to pop up.
huh. The Israel Lobby has gotten to google as well.
Even when you enter the entire url: link to normanfinkelstein.com
in google, the website does not show up.
It can't be an accident.
This is very disturbing.
Internet is the last bastion of free speech in this country.
We are now China, and moving ever closer to the Chinese government censorship model.
Yet another reason not use Google.
And remember this from October 2007:
"Harvard Prof Says Google Cancelled His Talk on Israel Lobby"?
http://www.philipweiss.org/mondoweiss/2007/10/harvard-dean-sa.html
Finkelstein, Google, BDS?
I often encounter a similar problem when trying to access this site. I can use either the drop-down arrow by the url address or a bookmark from my rss reader to access Mondoweiss and RoadRunner directs me to a site saying url not found. I don't even get the 404 NotFound page. RoadRunner cuts me off before my browser gets there. If I grab a neighboring wireless signal that's not RoadRunner I get through just fine. A few hours later the same links work.
I don't think Google is as stupid as you think. This is probably the work of hackers. Censorship like this would get to the main stream press and do extreme damage to the credibility of Google.
Hackers who modified the Finkelstein site then? It sounds plausible. You can put tags in the pages of a site that tell bots not to search them.
It's not showing up in google cache either: link to normanfinkelstein.com
rel=”nofollow”>site:link to normanfinkelstein.com
I don't think it's been hacked.
Wish Finkelstein offered an RSS feed !!!! Like everyone else does … Does he know he has no RSS – or is it I cannot see it.
No problem getting google results for finkelstein in the UK
actually I see your point – his website did not show
Google has automated bots that identify Web pages and sites as Web spam. If a site is so identified, then it is flagged and links to it will not show up as results for any search. This happened to the site for our research group's Web pages once. Google has a mechanism for requesting that a person review the bot's classification and, if appropriate, removing the spam flag.
I suspect that this is what has happened.
Google strives to steer its spiders clear of "non reputable brands." This from its CEO just this week:
"On the subject of tweaking Google's algorithm to lean towards "credible brands," Schmidt reminded people, "We actually do that in the case of Google News. Google News uses a relatively fixed set of sources which are selected based on exactly the kind of trust that you’re describing."
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/04/08/google-ceo-eric-schmidt-fires-back-at-newspapers
It may not be long before Mondoweiss is purged from Google News, where it is doing very well. That an important voice like Finkelstein is being slowly silenced in the general Google search should come as no surprise.
But in the end, Sergey Brin's dedication to scholarship, rather than zionism, is most likely to keep Google searches relevant, rather than politicized:
http://www.momentmag.com/Exclusive/2007/2007-02/200702-BrinFeature.html
The fearful can always download Abe Foxman's "Hate" filter:
http://www.adl.org/PresRele/Internet_75/4054_75.htm
You can also reach his official website by using Ask Jeeves
It's obvious Google is out to get Finkelstein. It's good for their business to make enemies. Maybe they are sending the money they are making on the Finkelstein searches over to Dershowitz.
I just did a spell check and Frankenstein came up as a spelling for Finkelstein and Berkowitz came up for Dershowitz. Notice how Finkelstein is compared to a monster and Dershowitz is compared with just a mild generic Jewish name.
I don't know about you, but to me this is clear proof of the power of the "Lobby".
Mondoweiss is blocked by verizon cell service.
Yes Julian,
It is all an innocent mistake, nothing to worry about.
Tomorrow De Paul will see the error of it's ways and offer Finkelstein the tenure, and we are all just conspiracy theorists…….
I just did a search on Google for "Smagacz" and it came back as "smegma", so it seems to be working remarkably well.
On wikipedia, Google loyalists are currently removing references to this censorship.
That's not Jim Haygood. It's one of the barren hasbara sock puppets stealing Jim's good name, as usual.
BTW Berkowitz =Son Of Sam?
This article appeared in a Google news search now it to has disappeared. I again say this is the work of hackers. This should be investigated. Could the Chinese Government be behind this?
Citizen:
"BTW Berkowitz =Son Of Sam?"
Good point. There must be a conspiracy against Dershowitz also.
Curiouser and curiouser…
*Hackers who modified the Finkelstein site then? It sounds plausible. You can put tags in the pages of a site that tell bots not to search them.*
I checked the robots.txt and the header for normanfinkelstein.com for meta tags that would prohibit indexing. I did not find anything.
It does not look to me like anyone has hacked Norman's site.
Google is well known for censoring various webpages.
This is why the internet search hegemony of Google MUST end – the world needs more search engine alternatives.
Try Cuil.
Cuil works. Thanks.
I'll have the "accidentally classified as webspam" explanation from 'happened tome' then. With fries.
ask.com is NOT censoring Finkelstein
Icerocket does not have the site. They do not censor or so they claim.
The horror of this Finkelstein Google fiasco is only compounded by the fact that "CAMERA: Norman Finkelstein's Fraudulent Scholarship" is the second result after Finkelstein's wikipedia page.
P.S.
I emailed google and told them they were inviting litigious attacks upon themselves by disrespecting the first amendment.
Some of these comments are ridiculous. You guys are making a huge assumption with absolutely no factual basis. Many pages are blacklisted from Google mistakenly. As another commenter said, a simple appeal to Google will get it corrected. If Google is, in fact, intentionally censoring him, they're doing a horrible job considering the second result for "norman finkelstein" is a preview of his book…on Google Books.
Nick
The second result is not real time close. Get your brain together in view of steps not to reach the party, or reach too late.
Bob, the Chinese government would have no reason, to my knowledge, to want something about Israel censored. They also don't have that kind of pull in the U.S.
Ever hear of a thing called sarcasm? I think Israel has that kind of pull.
I think this is a web site configuration error. The web site has a technical error which may have opted it out of Google indexing. There's a file on every web site called "robots.txt" which allows a site to "opt out" of systems that automatically read sites, like Google. The one for "www.normanfinkelstein.com" is set up wrong, and I suspect Google is interpreting it as an "opt out".
Here's the technical explanation.
The "robots.txt" file at "link to normanfinkelstein.com
is a redirect. That link will take you to "link to normanfinkelstein.com
(note the trailing slash). That's wrong.
Try putting "link to normanfinkelstein.com
into a "robots.txt" checker like "link to tool.motoricerca.info
and you get the message "ERROR: Redirect detected. Please insert the actual file URL".
Tell the site webmaster to fix this, then log into Google webmaster tools and use Google's robots.txt checker on his own site.
Looking back in the Internet Archive, that "robots.txt" file used to have a different problem. I suspect somebody tried to fix it recently and botched the job.
Nagle's points are probabaly correct.
I noticed that ngf's site is getting some sort of update at the moment: link to code.google.com
I would not be surprised if this was related to the site's disappearance.
I posted a message in Google help asking if www.normanfinkelstein.com was being censored and I got this reply:
John Nagle has posted an answer to the question "Is google censoring www.normanfinkelstein.com?":
This looks like a "robots.txt" problem. "link to normanfinkelstein.com
redirects to "link to normanfinkelstein.com
(note trailing slash). That's an error. "robots.txt" has to be served as the filename "robots.txt", not as some redirected name, according to the Robot Exclusion Protocol.
Googlebot is probably interpreting this botched "robots.txt" file as an "opt out".
I've sent a comment to the site's owner.
The robots file still redirects to the url with the trailing slash but google again lists normanfinkelstein.com. Maybe they hacked their own code. Like this: If isurlnormanfinkelsteins() then ignorerobotstxtandjustcatalogthebleedingsite().
Which brings closure to this episode.
I dunno. If the site webmaster wants to report what the Google webmaster tools say about the site, they can provide some solid information. But only someone with control over the domain can access those tools. It would be helpful if someone responsible for the site posted the Google dashboard output for the site. Then everybody would know what the issue was, and we could stop speculating.
The home page could use some work. Run it through the HTML validator ("link to validator.w3.org
/>
and you get 448 errors and 10 warnings. (To whom it may concern: if you write your page as XHTML, you're supposed to close all the tags.) Google is rather tolerant of most HTML errors, but some errors will cause the crawler to give up. After looking at that mess, I'm inclined to blame the webmaster.
(I write this from the perspective of someone who runs a minor search engine, "Sitetruth.com". I see problems like this regularly.
If somebody complained on Search Engine Watch or Webmaster World, where people go for problems like this, that their site wasn't being indexed, they'd be told to fix their site before complaining to the search engine operators.)
Incidentally, someone asked if the site has an RSS feed. It does. Look at the lower right of the last line for a link. There's even a "link" tag for auto-discovery of the RSS feed. Just feed the site's home page into your RSS reader. It even passes the W3C feed validator.
Too be honest – I'm a bigger fan of Dogpile than Google. They support charitable causes and work with all independent search providers to give a good mix of results. People are too lazy when it comes to search and want it all to be laid out for them in one engine. Problem is, Google, MSN and Yahoo all pick what shows up where. Research is meant to be RESEARCH – so look around for solid results. BTW – Dogpile.com just launched a new site called http://www.DoGreatGood.com – and their donating a portion of there revenue to Petfinder and the ASPCA. Great that theres a way we can help dog adoption programs at no cost.