Search for Barack Aboma in Google and you will get a "Did you mean: barack obama" suggestion, and the top 2 results for Barack Obama:

Search for George Busch and you won’t get any suggestions:

You will just get stuff like Bush getting a shoe thrown at him and "George Busch is a Fascist" t-shirts.

This has led some to speculate that Google is showing its political bias. Top executives with the company were very open about supporting Barack Obama during his presidential campaign. Eric Schmidt even appeared in Obama’s 30 minute infomercial. This surely only adds to the speculation.

"So what is this all about?" asks someone under the handle Discovery on Search Engine Watch’s Forum. "Obama who Google endorses has all negative pictures, negative sites and negative videos completely removed and his self promoting website put in their place while at the same time George Busch has every single nasty photo, nasty attack site and video presented with NO alterations by Google’s editors to direct searchers to what they deem a more relevant site?"

Is this what is really going on though? You may get the suggestion of a correct spelling with "Aboma," but there are still negative results in the "Aboma" listings. Stuff like "Will Barack Aboma Try To Destroy America?" Further more, if I search for George Bushl, I get a suggestion for "George Bush" and his top 2 results, which are links to his Wikipedia page and to the White House. And the George Bushl results aren’t that bad either.

Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable, who  makes it clear he doesn’t think Google is doing any biasing, thinks it is more a bias of the American people and the results are simply a reflection of that. "But is there more going on?" he asks.

Perhaps Google just doesn’t have its algorithm fine-tuned to eliminate political bias for every possible misspelling of every possible search. And frankly, they’ve probably got more important issues to worry about than providing the best results for erroneous searches. I personally would rather see them continue to improve search for correctly spelled queries.

Tradition and Transition

A controversial Washington Post article discusses the state of the technology situation in the White House as the Bush Administration moved out and the Obama Administration moved in. The article takes the angle of the Obama crew being forced to step back into the "dark ages" and use "old software" and Microsoft instead of Mac, disconnected phone lines, etc. Obama’s team were using Gmail addresses because their new white house addresses had yet to be set up. An Obama spokesman said it was like "going from an Xbox to an Atari."

Perhaps that’s just how it is. "The White House itself is an institution that transitions regardless of who the president is," says David Almacy, Internet Director under the Bush Administration. "The White House is not starting from scratch. Processes are already in place."

"Bureaucracy is nonpartisan," he says. "Moving 3,000 people out and 3,000 people in is a Herculean task." That is worth considering when it comes to the phone lines, email addresses, etc. Although one might think they would have had plenty of time to get this worked out by the time the new President was ready to take office.

As far as the technology itself, a lot of people around the Internet are taking the stance of "welcome to the real world". According to a Fox News article, "the White House has everything a modern corporate office would — Windows XP, BlackBerrys, Outlook e-mail, plenty of laptops and lots of flatscreen monitors and TVs." Owen Thomas at Valleywag had an interesting take:

Guess what? Outside the Manhattan media bubble and Silicon Valley’s startup cube farms, this is how most Americans work. Want a Macintosh? Sorry, IT hasn’t approved it. Oh, you need to use Facebook to interact with customers? Sorry, that site’s blocked — and management suspects that "social media" is a buzzword which means "getting paid to waste time chatting with friends." Want to use some new blogging service? Fill out this three-page questionnaire about the site’s security practices, please.

This is not a story about digital pioneers getting cast back into the Stone Age; it’s about a privileged elite learning how the rest of the country has to work. Those "six-year-old versions of Microsoft software"? That must mean Windows XP. If you haven’t noticed, most people still prefer XP over Microsoft’s clunky, buggy, annoying new Vista. Here’s a suggestion for the Obamans: Stop whining about the tools taxpayers have paid for, and get to work learning how to cope with what your employer gives you, just like the rest of us.

But still, you have to think the people behind a Presidential campaign that was practically built on using technology and highlighting tech policies might have some kind of grasp on the reality of the situation. The real issue is where technology and security clash with each other, and speaking of Herculean tasks, how about staying transparent and completely secure at the same time?

Security

The national security agency added special security software to Obama’s blackberry so that he could continue to use it. "This means Obama can continue emailing routine and personal messages that will become part of the public record," says Stacey Higginbotham at GigaOm. "However, some of the more ‘fun’ functions of a smartphone, such as IM and those requiring GPS functionality, won’t be available for his use. So far no data channels appear to be secure enough for Top Secret emails."

You’ve probably read about how the Obama administration cannot use Facebook, instant messenger clients, and outside email accounts. How will this kind of stuff affect the transparency that the Obama administration is trying to maintain?

Transparency and New Media

If you were expecting to be updated from the new staff via Twitter, you might want to read this story. A fake White House Twitter account has been posting presidential updates, but beware that it is not coming from the real source.

Everybody knows by now that YouTube videos are one way Obama intends to remain transparent. He and his staff frequently communicate with the people through them. Some questions have been raised about why YouTube is getting preferential treatment, however.

The Privacy Policy at WhiteHouse.gov depicts very strict rules about using persistent cookies on government sites, YouTube is apparently exempt from this because they want to be able to embed YouTube videos on the site. Some are wondering why they don’t just use their own video service. "The U.S. should be able to stream videos through its own service at this point without making YouTube its default online video service," says Frederic Lardinois at Read Write Web.

It’s only been a few days since the inauguration though. There are certainly kinks to be worked out. Interestingly, the new administration has unblocked Google from crawling info on the White House site. Previously there were a lot of pages being blocked that were available to the public anyway.

Open Source and Changing Tradition

The new administration may not have been thrilled about the state of the White House’s technology, and there may be certain aspects of it that just can’t be sacrificed, but that doesn’t mean that change isn’t an option. Already Obama has shown an interest in open source. Sun Chairman Scott Mcnealy says that the President has asked him to author a white paper on potential benefits to the government of open source solutions.

"The government ought to mandate open-source products based on open-source reference implementations to improve security, get higher-quality software, lower costs, higher reliability–all the benefits that come with open software," says McNealy as quoted by BBC News.

He also says that the CIO should have "veto power, the right to eliminate any hardware, software or networking product that touches the federal network…He or she would have real power, real oversight and employ real consequences for folk that don’t realign with the architecture. It’s what every business does that the government doesn’t."

From the sounds of it, change is definitely in the air, which should come as no surprise to anyone who has witnessed a single iota of what the President’s campaign has been about. However, that doesn’t mean that change doesn’t come with restrictions, and compromises are going to have to be made. Transparency and new media efforts will not be able to work without the security needed to protect the country.

I’m only saying that, aside from entries and edits made to more clerical and administrative areas of Wikipedia, "W." leads as the topic of choice among editors and writers there. Jesus isn’t even second; he’s in third place, behind the United States.

Perhaps, "less agreeable" is better than "popular."

According to the stats provided by Wikipedia, over 32,000 edits have been made to articles about George W. Bush by 3,622 users, doubling the number of edits made to entries about the U.S. with 16,594 from 2,320 users.

As for the Prince of Peace, the Wonderful Counselor, God With Us? Seems there’s less to quarrel with. Only 1,747 users have made 15,286 edits to articles about Jesus.

At least he trumps the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict (14,287 edits) and his, well, antithesis, Adolf Hitler (14,287), who edges out World War II in general (14,033), RuneScape (13,155), Hurricane Katrina (12,754), and Nintendo Wii (12,465).

Ah, the things humans will argue about.

Those are overall numbers since Wikipedia’s inception. Here are the top 25 most edited articles as of March 2007 (the latest numbers Wikipedia made available):

1.    300 (film)
2.    George W. Bush
3.    Deaths in 2007
4.    PlayStation 3
5.    Wikipedia
6.    Essjay controversy
7.    Harry Potter
8.    Eminem
9.    Battle of Thermopylae
10.    Borat
11.    Conservapedia
12.    United States
13.    American Idol (season 6)
14.    Grand Theft Auto IV
15.    World War II
16.    Saint Patrick’s Day
17.    Beyonce Knowles
18.    WrestleMania 23
19.    McDonald’s
20.    Kobe Bryant
21.    2007
22.    2007 Cricket World Cup
23.    Christianity
24.    Jesus
25.    American Idol

• your own experiences – how you save time, your favorite work tips, things that slow you down, interactions with others, how your perspective has changed over time, etc.
• encourage readers to ask you questions – use a button like this one, and run open threads where you answer questions
• find common questions in forums that are typically poorly answered – why doesn’t Google show all my backlinks and why hasn’t my PageRank changed? etc.
• common misconceptions in your marketplace which are spread as fact – new websites can’t rank, etc
• interview other experts, create interactive contests, offer awards, etc. – these touches the ego of others and uses their reach to help market your site
• bring back old classics that are not talked about too much in the current marketplace and compare them to the current market. You can’t go wrong bringing up Orwell’s Politics and the English Language, Bush’s As We May Think, Hardin’s The Tragedy of the Commons
• show how your topical language has shifted – compare news from the 1950s to today, there are many stories from the 1980s and earlier which are easily accessible via Google News, but have not been pushed heavily on the web graph
• compare information from different formats – blogs, magazines, books, dvds, conferences, stuff in Google Scholar, etc.
• content behind firewalls – bring these ideas into the active parts of the web
• find ideas that were popular and spread on other networks, seamlessly aggregate the best parts in a new way which allows the structure to add significant value
• parallel markets – read information from other markets and relate it to your current market

Comments

 Don’t worry, he doesn’t list all of them there. He does, though, if you like learning the origin of phrases, go into where the phrase "There’s no such thing as a free lunch" comes from.

The most popular of the free queries were searches for free games, music, and ringtones. Well, that’s the family friendly version.

The Skinemax version is that most of time, freeloaders are looking for sex, sex stories, sex videos, and sex pics. These may also want to do a search on "free virus protection," while they’re at it.

If memory serves, though, free ringtones, games and wallpaper are dangerous queries, too.

As you might expect, free shipping is most popular around the holidays, and free games, chat and movies are more in demand during the lazy summers.

Here are a couple of other idiomatic origins, just for good measure:

You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
 

U.S. Broadband To Reach 86 Million Households

The report "US Broadband Forecast, 2007 to 2012: LECs Maintain Advantage over Cable Operators in Quest for New Subscribers" says that because of high-speed service there will be close to 36 million new broadband subscribers in the next five years.

"Price reductions are responsible for driving take-rates for DSL services offered by the incumbent local exchange carriers, while higher broadband transmission rates and attractive bundles are driving consumer adoption of cable modem service," said Doug Williams, Analyst at JupiterResearch.

"As broadband becomes more attractive to consumers from an economic perspective, current dial-up users will be more likely to migrate to broadband service, and consumers who are new to the online population will never take dial-up service in the first place."

JupiterResearch estimates that the 33 million dial-up Internet households will drop by more than two-thirds by 2012 but that the market for dial-up service will not totally disappear.

"Despite moderating growth for broadband services, significant market opportunities for broadband service providers still exist," said David Schatsky, President of JupiterResearch.

"Cable operators and local exchange carriers will remain the key market participants, while alternative broadband service providers will continue to struggle to integrate into the mass market."

Rather than be accused of rigging the test I’m going to grab all of the actors/actresses listed in the top actors section of the Yahoo Buzz Report. The list has been de-duped and alpha sorted, results with Wikipedia in the top ten are indicated with an *, results with Wikipedia in the top 3 are indicated with an !:

[Aishwarya Rai] !
[Alec Baldwin] !
[Angelina Jolie] !
[Angie Harmon] !
[Carmen Electra] !
[Drew Barrymore] !
[Elizabeth Hurley] !
[Eva Longoria] !
[Goldie Hawn] !
[Halle Berry] !
[Hilary Duff] !
[Hugh Grant] !
[Jaimee Foxworth] !
[Jamie-lynn Discala] !
[Jennifer Aniston] !
[Jennifer Lopez] !
[Jessica Alba] !
[Jessica Biel] !
[Kelly Ripa] !
[Kerry Washington] !
[Kristanna Loken] *
[Linda Hamilton] !
[Lindsay Lohan] !
[Lucy Liu] !
[Pamela Anderson] *
[Richard Gere] !
[Rosie Perez] !
[Sarah Silverman] !
[Scarlett Johansson] !
[Shawnee Smith] !
[Shilpa Shetty] !
[Tobey Maguire] !
[Tori Spelling] !
[Yasmine Bleeth] !

So out of 35 of the most popular actors searched on the web last week Wikipedia has top 10 listings on all 35. More impressive is that they have a top 3 listing on 33 out of 35 listings. Most were number 2 with the odd #1 or #3 thrown in. If you bothered to click through you might have noticed that IMDB was #1 for most of the listings, and you’re wondering why I’m not complaining about that. Let’s cruise on over to the top overall searches for the same time period. Again list has been de-duped and alpha sorted * for Wikipedia top ten ! for Wikipedia top 3. To make it even more apparent I’ll remove any of the people listed in the top actors list as well:

[Akon] !
[American Idol] !
[Avril Lavigne] !
[Beyonce Knowles] !
[Britney Spears] !
[Chris Daughtry] !
[Christie Brinkley] !
[Dancing Bush]
[Democratic Presidential Debate 2007]
[Department Of Defense] !
[Elvis On American Idol]
[Hi-5]
[Internal Revenue Service] *
[Kelly Clarkson] !
[Lost] !
[Mark Twain] !
[Mike Penner]
[Milka Duno] !
[Naruto] !
[NBA] *
[New England Journal Of Medicine] *
[Prime Numbers] !
[Prince Harry] !
[Pussycat Dolls] !
[Regis Philbin] !
[Rocky Mountain News]
[Rosie O’Donnell] !
[RuneScape] !
[Sea Otters] !
[Spider-Man 3] *
[T-Pain] !
[WWE] !

Out of 32 possible terms Wikipedia had top 10 listings on 27. Out of 27 possible terms Wikipedia had top 3 listings for 22. These aren’t ordinary terms either, they are high volume search terms. Ok some people are saying that’s Yahoo list not Google’s, so why didn’t you use the Google Zeitgeist? Well as has already been demonstrated Google lies on the Google Zeitgeist so let’s leave the Pinocchio of search sitting in the corner. Next we’ll look at the terms that didn’t have Wikipedia listings int he SERP’s:

[Dancing Bush] – that’s news, people were really looking for DancingBush.com, not enough time for it to be in Wikipedia yet and be authority scored yet.

[Democratic Presidential Debate 2007] – that’s a news item again.

[Elvis On American Idol] – It was Elvis theme week on American Idol and Celene Dion sang with Elvis, so again news.

[Hi-5] – This one surprised me HI-5 is a transplant Australian kids band and has a Wikipedia page so go figure.

[Mike Penner] – Mike is sports writer who announced he’s having a sex change operation, so again news.

[Rocky Mountain News] – I have no idea why people are looking for this, nothing jumped out at me, drop something in the comments if you know.

What conclusions can we draw, wikipedia’s, not a good source for recent news, so you won’t find those types of items there. What else changed, IMDB.com dropped out of all of the searches except [Spider-Man 3] which is a movie. That’s exactly how it’s supposed to work, IMDB is a topical authority, they dominate in their area of expertise and not in any other area.

What’s the problem with with Wikipedia, well in a word wikiality (how funny is it that Wikipedia has a #2 listing for [wikiality] further proving my point). Anyone with a computer can edit Wikipedia, and we rely on the least common denominator of mob intelligence to determine accuracy. That wasn’t entirely true, you can actually win an editing war if you are willing to expend large amounts of time defending your fiefdom of personal edits, I just have better things to do with my time.

Why am I complaining, isn’t Wikipedia free and non commercial? Have you visited techcrunch and learned that Wikipedia has removed the no follow from links to their new commercial project wikia. Starting to see a problem yet? Who do you think is going to be the number one traffic referrer for Wikia … Wikipedia. Kinda gives them an unfair advantage getting all that free traffic from Google doesn’t it? What’s really going on is Google is willingly allowing Wikipedia to be a doorway page to funnel traffic to Wikia, not a bad set up to be on the other side of the cash register for eh?

How do we fix this problem, Google has to admit that Wikipedia really isn’t an authority for anything. Sure some of the information there is good, but I can’t tell you how many facts in the past 3 weeks I found that were omitted, misinterpreted, or just plain wrong. What you think I should do my part and fix them? Know what I’m not on Wikipedia or wikias payroll so why should I help them out? Adding no follow and taking away the value of the links removed the invisible currency and payment that existed. So now I have to guess and determine if I am going to get enough traffic from them before somebody who doesn’t have to qualify their level of expertise comes along and decides they don’t like my edit for whatever reason and just removes it. Wow sure sounds like a website that should be dominating the SERP’s don’t you think?

Comments

Tag:

If you want the "ultimate Britney Spears experience," which includes her hair, the electric shaver she used, a partly consumed Red Bull, and one used blue Bic lighter, you’ll have to visit BuyBritneysHair.com. Oh, and you’ll need (pausing menacingly as I place my pinky finger to the corner of my mouth) one meeel-yun dollars.

Originally, the shorn remains of Britney’s career were posted on eBay with the minimum bid set at a cool million. But as noted on the new auction page (where bandwidth costs money, and hence the slowness), eBay cancelled the auction for unknown reasons – unless hair is considered a body part.

Now you can search on eBay and find two full pages of auctions offering Britney’s hair, but those are bald-faced lies it would seem, even if some of them are quite convincing about getting it shipped all the way from America. Some of the hair for sale is blonde, so it must have been collected pre- um – wig out.

No, if you want real, dyed in the sink, made in America Britney hair, you’ll have to pick it up personally from the proprietors of Esther’s Haircutting Studio in Tarzana, California, who really, really hate this boost of free publicity and would never exploit this hair-raising, er, hair-falling situation. That’s why a portion of the proceeds will go to charity. Oh, and their phone number, in large comforting numbers, is at the bottom of the webpage.

If you’re too poor, or too mentally healthy, to buy the real thing, there’s no shortage of memorabilia still on eBay. There are the printed out screen caps of the original auction starting at just $14.99; Britney Spears Buzz Cut Special barbershop signs; paintings of the newly Sinead-o-fied starlet; and of course the entrepreneurial opportunist staple, the completely copyright-infringing tabloid cover t-shirt.

Don’t worry about them being deleted. Sellers are reposting them faster than eBay can say "hair-brained scheme."

Next thing you know, they’ll be auctioning off Lisa Nowak’s diapers. Oh, no.

eBay could not be reached for comment.

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No More Google Bombs?

Doing a search for miserable failure is no longer as entertaining as it used to be. No more seeing George Bush or Jimmy Carter, or a handful of other people, appear at the top of the Google search results for those terms.

Google has implemented some algorithm updates to take the fun out of Google bombing, according to Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan. He described the change as a move to “stop such mass link pranks from working.”

The change also took out the ‘waffles’ Google bomb that used to bring up Senator John Kerry’s website as a top result. Legitimate discussion about the tactic remains in place as Danny noted:

Google also provided commentary on its Webmaster Central blog:

Now to provide a little context. Google made these changes only a few days after V7N announced it had come up with a link-selling program that would be undetectable to search engines. After Matt Cutts discussed it, V7N dropped the ‘undetectable’ claim from their marketing of the service.

Prior to that, Matt had posted a brief observation about ‘pay-for-blogging’ services. “Links in those paid-for posts should be made in a way that doesn’t affect search engines.”

It looks more like Google’s bomb squad was more keen on defusing possible competitors to AdSense than in saving the world from a miserable failure.

As a business, they may have decided that being a conduit for someone else’s money-making plan doesn’t make much sense. Improving query relevance for a relative handful of search terms is a bonus.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

“One of the things that we have to value is that that we do have a media, free media that’s able to do what they want to do and I – you ask me to say something in front of all the camera here [laughter]. Help over there will ya? I just got to keep talking and word of mouth, there’s blogs, there’s internet, there’s all kinds of ways to communicate which is literally changing the way people get their information and so if you’re concerned I would suggest that you reach out to some of the groups that are supporting the troops, that got internet sites and just keep the word moving.”

There’s video footage here. Sounds like he might actually get it…or someone close to him sure does. Now, does the government work with bloggers to do the same? It’s unclear.

Link: Bush: Use Blogs to Spread the Truth About Iraq

Reader Comments…

Steve Rubel is a PR strategist with nearly 16 years of public relations, marketing, journalism and communications experience. He currently serves as a Senior Vice President with Edelman, the largest independent global PR firm.

He authors the Micro Persuasion weblog, which tracks how blogs and participatory journalism are changing the public relations practice.