> 'Yes, Google Uses Its Power to Quash Ideas It Doesn’t Like—I Know Because It Happened to Me'
Kashmir Hill recounts how we wrote an article critical of Google and the implied consequences of not quickly removing it:
But the most disturbing part of the experience was what came next: Somehow, very quickly, search results stopped showing the original story at all. As I recall it—and although it has been six years, this episode was seared into my memory—a cached version remained shortly after the post was unpublished, but it was soon scrubbed from Google search results. That was unusual; websites captured by Google’s crawler did not tend to vanish that quickly. And unpublished stories still tend to show up in search results as a headline. Scraped versions could still be found, but the traces of my original story vanished.
Google has a lot of power over popular opinion. All too easy to forget how easily it can control the narrative.