Google Purges The People's Cube Worldwide

thepeoplescube.com ^ | 3/10/2006 | Red Square

[the anti-liberal]

Open letter #2 to Google from the People's Cube
(posted on Google.com Help Center at 8:30pm on March 10, 2006

"Out of sight, out of mind" - translated into Russian and then back into English, the idiom turns into "invisible lunatics." That also describes The People's Cube's search results in Google.

Dear comrades at Google: At some point, quite recently, our popular site "The People's Cube" (ThePeoplesCube.com) was purged from Google search results. MSN , Yahoo and other search engines still have it - but Google has erased/blocked any link to the site in its database. One can still find links to us from other sites - but not even one from Google to ThePeoplesCube.com. We tried American, French, German, British, Australian, and Russian versions of Google - they used to give us traffic only a few days ago - but all we got was the same line in various languages: Sorry, no information is available for the URL thepeoplescube.com. And if we clicked on Find web pages from the site thepeoplescube.com we got Your search - site:thepeoplescube.com - did not match any documents.

~

The first time we saw this line it was written in Chinese - 对不起，找不到网址 thepeoplescube.com 的信息。 We used to look up The People's Cube for fun in the communist-censored Google China only weeks ago - and reported it on our site in a story called Google's Great Leap Forward. Of course our site was blocked by the Chinese government, with Google's consent, along with legions of other Western sites - but we couldn't imagine that only a few weeks later we would get the same results in English. The last time we checked we still lived in the United States - not China - but hey, whoever controls the information is the boss.

If it were a glitch in an algorithm it might throw our rankings back to the end of the line - but this is a total removal. We suspect it is also a deliberate removal - much in the spirit of 1984-style historical revisionism - removal of a "people's enemy" from life and history. Sergei Brin's Russian parents might tell him stories of people in Stalinist Russia disappearing, along with all their pictures and records. "Out of sight, out of mind" - translated into Russian and then back into English, the idiom turns into "invisible lunatics." That also describes The People's Cube's search results in Google.

We can only think of three reasons for this:

1. Google is retaliating against sites that ridiculed its Google China project.
2. Google has begun to implement its Google China policies in the rest of the free world.
3. A left-leaning Google employee who's got access to the database was suffering a nervous breakdown over the mockery of Marxism on our site, and so he or she dastardly removed/blocked The People's Cube, hoping to "improve" the public discourse by silencing the competition.

You tell me which one it is.

The People's Cube is a business corporation selling products on the Internet. A drop in traffic, caused by a malicious tempering with search results, has affected sales and that gives us grounds for you-know-what.

We'll start by posting this letter on our site and wait for your reply. We'll gladly drop the matter and similarly drop this post into the "memory hole" if we get a quick response from you and our high rankings in Google get immediately restored. An apology would be nice as well.

If you can, we'd appreciate if you pass the following word to our former compatriot Sergei Brin: "Seriozhka, konchai duraka valat' - bylo vremia kogda my toboi gordilis'!" (Sergie, stop making a fool out of yourself, we used to be proud of you!)

Keep the Cube rolling,
Comrade Red Square

[the anti-liberal]

There's more at the link.

I've never personally been to the People's Cube before today, but this was on the top of Michelle Malkin's blog - so here it is.

Here's a link to the first letter posted here on FR An open letter to Google from the People's Cube.

I've been using 'alltheweb' and 'clusty' for all of my web search needs, and they've worked great, I recommend dropping google and switching!

Do your part to fught communism, don't google, alltheweb and clusty instead!!

(Sorry to post and run, but I've got stuff that needs doin').

[the anti-liberal]

Fught s/b fight...

[gondramB]

It does appear they have been removed from google. One way for that to happen for the site (or someone impersonating the site) to request removal.

[Cinnamon]

We can only hope Google stops this BS, and gets on with business the way it is supposed to be. If not, there are plenty of underdogs willing to take the top spot.

[BenLurkin]

What is "ThePeople'sCube"? I've never heard of it.

[Stellar Dendrite]

interesting. another search engine, drudge mentioned: http://www.acoona.com

[palmer]

Sorry to post and run

Do you mean sorry to duplicate post and run?

[Zon]

Using Goggle's free search engine service the peoplescube.com gained a ton of traffic: "Meanwhile our traffic is down by about 50% thanks to the Google embargo."  -- thepeoplescube.com

"Whaa!! Whaaa! Whine!! I'm not getting anymore free traffic from Google. I have a right to get free traffic from Google. I'm gonna threaten to sue Google.": "A drop in traffic, caused by a malicious tempering with search results, has affected sales and that gives us grounds for you-know-what." They could start by getting the spelling correct: it's tampering, not tempering.

[Izzy Dunne]

Do your part to fught communism,

I've said this for years.

[the anti-liberal]

"If not, there are plenty of underdogs willing to take the top spot."

Like these underdogs? alltheweb and clusty?

:^)

[KarlInOhio]

It went from not enough traffic to too much traffic.

Service Temporarily Unavailable
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.
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Apache/1.3.33 Server at www.thepeoplescube.com Port 80

[DBrow]

Yup, alltheweb, clusty, and sometimes dogpile work for me.

Google frequently gives top ad space to very disreputable companies. A while back I googled up data on a popular digital camera, and the three top slots- preferred advertisers- were all rip-off companies with "customer satisfaction ratings" of less than one, and all had serious complaints on usenet.

Then, back before the USG stopped the sale, if you looked up "tryptamines" on google you got ads galore for companies that sold things like 5-methoxy alpha methyl tryptamine and phenylethylamines not explicitly scheduled (2-ct-7, Blue Mystic, and others)*. Lots of dope ads. But type Winchester and no ads at all pop up because guns are evil to google.

*Operation Web Tryp ended that practice by busting the vendors and putting them in jail.

[the anti-liberal]

"I've never heard of it."

And now you have!

[FReepaholic]

...Like these underdogs? alltheweb and clusty? ...

Clusty rocks! (except for phrase searches. G**gle is better for that.)

[the anti-liberal]

I searched first, then posted, then 'ran'.

If you have the link to another of this post, please post it.

[freepatriot32]

Libertarian ping.To be added or removed from my ping list freepmail me or post a message here

[BenLurkin]

You are correct.

What is it?

[the anti-liberal]

Yep, saw that too.

Well, what can you do...

[the anti-liberal]

From what I can tell, it's a sight that tries to convince 'progressive liberals' of reality. Good luck to them. When they come back up we'll both be able to check it out for ourselves and demermine for ourselves what they are - today, after visiting Michelle Malkin's blog, is the first I've heard of them myself.

[Cinnamon]

thank you very much for the links. I have now officially dropped google as my fave search engine.