Palestine Think Tank

Free Minds for a Free Palestine

Google Gags Uruknet - More internet censorship

By Mary Rizzo • Jun 19th, 2008 at 13:44 • Category: Action Alert, Ideas and Projects, Internet and Communication, Newswire, Zionism

UPDATE!!! INFO FROM URUKNET Google must really have a thing against Uruknet. After Google News’ censorship now Uruknet disappears even on Google’s search engine.

Google stopped indexing Uruknet the middle of May. After Uruknet wrote (again!) many e-mails to Google (and again! we didn’t receive any reply) Google restarted indexing some (not all!) Uruknet’s article on June 17. However, it seems that these articles have a short life on Google since they keep disappearing immediately after they are indexed.

For instance this is a Google’s page saved today, June 19, at 3pm Rome time and this is the same search Google page, the same day at 10 pm Rome time - While the first page at 3pm shows the Uruknet’s article indexed by Google, in the second page’s results the article disappeared and Google left simply the Uruknet’s homepage. Moreover Uruknet’s articles indexed by Google before the middle of May are disappearing as if someone is manually deleting them. As odd it may seem, it’s as if someone inside Google deleted the indexed article.

Google has already stopped indexing Uruknet from Google News, justifying it with lies and preposterous excuses. Now it seems Google is deleting even those Uruknet’s articles that had already been automatically indexed by the search engine.

Furthermore Google search engine shows Uruknet’s results at the very last position, if at all.

Google’s censorship becomes very clear if one contrasts and compares the search of the word “uruknet” on Google and Yahoo.

Searching the word “uruknet” on Google this evening the results were 194,000.

On Yahoo the same word shows 1,550,000 results.

We don’t ask anymore our readers to write to Google since we lost even our last hopes in their fairness and good faith, but we would be grateful if our readers could post and distribute this article over the Internet; this affair goes far beyond Uruknet and Internet censorship is a real threat and is happening now.

Of course we reserve the right to take legal action against Google.

Desert Peace Editorial: One of my Associates, Uruknet.Info, is once again the victim of Google’s zionist inspired polices. Just a month ago, the co-founder of Google was in Israel to ‘celebrate’ its 60 years as an occupying power… he obviously was inspired by his visit as his Company’s policies seem to have shifted even more to the right than they were before his trip.

Uruknet has been hacked, taken off Google News indexing and now, the latest… taken off Google completely. How can this be done? We really don’t know, but we do know that Google has refused to respond to the thousands of requests by readers to reinstate Uruknet on Google News. They came up with a response after weeks only to the site itself where it “reasoned” that Uruknet was “only” an aggregator. All of us know that it is an exceptionally important aggregator, but it is far more than that! It contains original material, has editorial choices and space for commentary and it presents for an international public much material that otherwise would not be translated or disseminated.Without being listed on Google, as much as we detest Google for its arbitrary blocking that many of us have had to undergo, losing readership in the meantime, we are able to admit that for a news site to not be listed AT ALL on Google means that NO ONE at all finds their articles on a simple search. This includes archived material. This is something that we find unacceptable and it demands that all of us try to do our best to take action to change this situation as soon as possible. Uruknet serves an important role on the Internet, it is one of the few sites where the truth can be found about the Iraqi War and the occupation of Palestine.

Friends in our Blogging Community are presently discussing plans on how to combat Google’s policies. I will keep you all posted on what those plans are. In the meantime, this post is just to make you aware of the situation in general. If anyone has ideas, please post them in the comments, anything that can help us will be appreciated. You can also email me at the address found in my links (About DesertPeace). I also urge my readers to cross post this message so that a real campaign can get underway to stop censorship at Google.
Thanks.
Mary Rizzo contributed to this post.
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Mary Rizzo is an art restorer, translator and writer living in Italy. Editor and co-founder of Palestine Think Tank, co-founder of Tlaxcala translations collective. Her personal blog is Peacepalestine.
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2 Responses »

  1. Google can do all they want , nothing really leaves the internet
    Use the Take Me Back Machine there is a ton of articles indexed for that great site.

    Also if you ever come across a dead link maybe the news media was forced to remove it, use the take me back machine it was most likely indexed there.

    http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.uruknet.info/

  2. just(at 09:11 am UK time on sunday the 29th of june 2008) connected to google and searched for uruknet and there it was. I clicked on the link and it opened. It seems then that making a big fuss about google aka goolag
    worked, all the better!

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