As several bloggers have already noted today, the White House has somehow altered the search function on their website so that it ignores virtually all mentions of the phrase "global warming." The funny thing is, they couldn't even manage to do that without screwing up.
At the moment, if you go to and type "global warming" (in quotes) into their search box, you get exactly one hit - a poorly scanned pdf version of a news article claiming - wait for it - that things were warmer in the recent past than they are now. If you do the same search, but use Google to search their site instead of relying on their own internal search engine, another 438 pages magically appear.
Here's where things get really funny: they weren't very competent when it came to getting their search engine to eliminate global warming. If you put global warming in quotes, you get no hits. If you type global warming in without the quotes, you get 4500+ hits, most of which contain the phrase "global warming," and should have been turned up in the first search.
A quick explanation is probably in order here for those who aren't familiar with the working of search engines. When you type more than one word into a search box, the search engine has to decide what you are really asking for. Most search engines, including both Google's and the White House's, decide that you want to see the pages that contain all of the words in the box, but that you don't care if those words appear in that order, or even near each other in the document. That can give you a lot more hits than you can deal with sometimes, so they built in a way to tell the search engine that you really do care about the word order. If you put your search phrase in quotes, it tells the search engine to show you just the pages that contain exactly that phrase.
The folks at the White House have clearly messed with their search function to make sure that the particular phrase "global warming" is ignored. There is absolutely no way that this could have been accidental. Other phrases work when typed in quotes, and there are many, many pages actually on the site that should have been located by the search for the phrase - if you view the html source code for this page, "global warming" is even listed as a keyword for the document.
This is amusingly petty-minded on the part of the White House, but I find myself getting angrier and angrier the more I think about it. As small (and small-minded) as this was, it still crosses a big line. Personally, this is an area I'd love to see Congress ask a few questions about. Who decided to try and screw with the public this much, why did they do it, and who told them to?
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James Wolcott: "To paraphrase a line from David Mamet's Homicide, Bush and Blair could fuck up a baked potato."
Substitute "this administration" for "Bush and Blair".
In fairness, are we sure that this was deliberate? Maybe the search engine just doesn't work very well. There's a forum I post at sometimes which is notoriously bad in this respect. Do a search on words which you know are present and it will often come up with far fewer posts than it should, if it comes up with anything at all.
"climate change": 627 hits with White House search engine, 986 with Google.
"weapons of mass destruction": 1698 hits, plus one "recommendation" from White House. 2540 with Google.
"Saddam Hussain": 1665 with White House. 2650 with Google.
The White House search engine isn't good, but it's not that bad.
If this really is the case --that they're suppressing 'global warming' search results on the whitehouse page-- then it kind of makes you wonder just what other terms they're playing with:
stem cell...scooter libby...kyoto protocol...
To be honest, I have a lot of trouble believing that Bush would order something like this. First, I just don't think he spends much of his time thinking about the White House web site, and second, he's trying to get global warming in front of as many eyes as possible.
Admittedly, he's not doing that for altruistic purposes, he just needs something to help his lagging ratings. Since global warming is such a hot issue (no pun intended), he is using it as a way to show the American people that he's not the Antichrist. Personally, I don't think he's the Antichrist, but I do think he's a flaming idiot...
152 for "stem cell" with the White House search; 633 with Google.
73 for "libby" with the White House search; 108 with Google. 171 for "Kyoto Protocol", versus 227 with Google.
Searching for stem cell without quotes with the White House engine yields 1397 results, versus 664 with Google (an odd turnabout).
What searches get you the *same* as google? Maybe they just haven't run the crawler since Clinton left.
KeithB: The search engine is up-to-date on indexing.
You get hits on Tony Snow's January 18, 2007 press briefing for "addiction to oil" but not for "global warming" which appears in the same sentence.
Yaneev, I doubt Bush is more than vaguely aware there is a whitehouse.gov website. The boss of the search engine programmer might not even know the specifics. All it would take is someone, somewhere up the chain saying, "Y'know, the search results on our web page should better reflect the administration's position." The rest is implementation, something the Bush White House is great at screwing up.
he he, u made a design inference , huh huh huh
I remember a day, far in the past, when the official whitehouse site was very useful for researching legitimate matters of state, like for history classes and such. I remember finding it a fabulous resource to learn about inner workings of government and track down obscure legislation with a well-run search engine.
Now, it seems to be Bush's personal propaganda page, with his own staff of newsies (or something) who lavish fellatio-like praise on him and his policies.
Orwell, damn you and your clairvoyance!
It's still true!