SEO Skeptic

An SEO Skeptic gold star to Aaron Wall for his post today regarding PageRank scultping, Expert SEO Testing: Usually Worthless.  Since the recent "announcements" that Google is now basically disregarding efforts at controlling internal linking using the nofollow attribute - "PR sculpting" - there's been a whole lot of hand-wringing in the SEO community about Google getting their messaging straight.  These usually public protestations don't actually address the point Wall makes so well in his post:  was there genuine value in using nofollow for PR sculpting anyway?
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Today marks the twentieth anniversary of the brutal suppression of public protest in support of democracy in China's Tiananmen Square.  The protests, which had begun on 14 April 1989, ended on 4 June when tanks from the People's Liberation Army cleared demonstrators from the square.  While the exact number of deaths that resulted from this action will never be known, it seems plausible that several hundred protesters, along with a handful of police and military personnel, were killed.  The carnage inflicted by the police and PLA have resulted in the event being commonly labeled as the "Tiananmen Square Massacre."

These basic facts are readily available to me through a Google search, which returns the Wikipedia article, citations for civilians killed from PBS, and the New York Times, as well as a large number of views of the now iconic image of a lone figure in a white shirt standing in front of a column of tanks (the 3 June 2009 New York Times Lens Blog carried an excellent retrospective on the "Tank Man of Tiananmen").

I do not, of course, live in China.  Were I a Chinese resident that same Google search would have rendered an entirely different set of results, and even the most basic information on the Internet regarding the events of 4 June 1989 would be inaccessible to me.  It seems appropriate on this anniversary to take a look back on how Google, Yahoo and Microsoft each reached the state of affairs we can observe today (and which are detailed below specifically in regard to "tiananmen square" queries):  active collusion with the Chinese government in the censorship of search results.
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A brief rant here, in the "if I hear this one more time I'm going to scream" category, occasioned by a Matt Cutts Twitter comment via Kevin Newcomb on Search Engine Watch.

As Cutts himself Twittered this morning: "Hey, did you hear our latest inside tip? Make relevant content. ;)"

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When Google introduced paid link reporting via Webmaster Tools in 2007, in marked the second time human informants were solicited to help the search engine.  The first - less contentious - invitation a year earlier was the spam report, by which conscientious website owners (or their minions) could report such things as sneaky JavaScript redirects, doorway pages and even "misleading or repeated words."  These share with paid links the characteristic that they are potentially hard to detect, and indicate that the machines crunching through all those web pages are still occasionally outsmarted by some upstart human.
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I just came across posts by both Ask and Live Search bragging how they were 2009 Webware 100 winners.  I decided to take a peak to verify what I guessed, that all the major search engines were on the list.  Here are the award winners in the "Search & Reference Category":
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