First Climategate, now Googlegate?

It’s getting weirder and weirder on the climategate front indeed. A few days ago I started to come across rumours that Google was ‘censoring’ the term ‘climategate’ from its “Google Suggest” function in the Google Search – that little automatic drop-down menu that appears when you type in any kind of search into the search window. Google developed the function to provide you with a guide as to what’s ‘out there’, based in parts on your own search history, in parts on what’s popular on the Internet.

At first I was inclined to dismiss that as crazy paranoia. Why would Google do something that outlandish and stupid – at least outside China?

Well, considering how often I look for climategate, I would have expected Google Suggest to have figured it out by now and give me what I want. But… look for yourself.

This is what I get:

When I look for ‘climate’, I get a long list of terms – some less popular than others, but none of them climategate:

And it’s not as if ‘climategate’ is unpopular on the net these days, at least count there were a good 33 MILLION hits on the net:

While ‘climate audit’ – which ranks quite high on the Google Suggest list only has 1,2 Million hits:

And what about ‘climatemaster’, which also pops up on the Google Suggest every time you type ‘climate’? well, a grand-total of about 50 thousand hits.

So, to get this straight: a term with just about 50k hits gets included into the Google Suggest function, but a term with almost 660 times MORE hits on the internet is not?

Heck, let’s go for climateg:

And what if I go for the full word? That should get me something, no?

Well… judge for yourself:

Ok, so maybe Google got tired of all those ‘gates’ and decided not to list them for reasons of sillyness? I’d support that. But… look what I found:

Monicagate, remember that one?

Or Plamegate, what about that?

Spygate, still something you remember?

Or bushgate?

By the way, if you have the time, check out Yahoo on this one:

But here’s the real surprise: Microsoft Bing. Three letters is all it takes and you’re there. Weird spelling, mind you, but…

Ok, all you geeks out there, what’s up with that? Any reasonable technological suggestions that would explain this? Because I really would like to know.

PS: And to deal with the objection that the issue may be too recent, here’s how Google deals with the Surprised Kitty: