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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:
- Google is retaliating against sites that ridiculed its Google China project.
- Google has begun to implement its Google China policies in the rest of the free world.
- 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 |
