Spreading the Free Market Around
by David Atkins ("thereisnospoon")
Rick Santorum has a well-known Google problem. Offended by little Rick's signature homophobia, sex columnist Dan Savage used internet activism to essentially redefine Santorum as, well, a less-than-sanitary potential byproduct of gay sex that now comes up as the top link on when searching for Rick Santorum on Google.
Little Rick contacted Google about fixing the problem, which in itself just made the problem worse through increased press coverage. For its own part, Google has responded:
A Google spokesperson responded to Santorum by advising that users who want "content removed from the Internet should contact the webmaster of the page directly."
"Google’s search results are a reflection of the content and information that is available on the web. Users who want content removed from the Internet should contact the webmaster of the page directly," the spokesperson said. "Once the webmaster takes the page down from the web, it will be removed from Google’s search results through our usual crawling process."
The spokesperson said that Google does not "remove content from our search results, except in very limited cases such as illegal content and violations of our webmaster guidelines."
I don't know what Rick is complaining about. A private individual used individual initiative to redefine a word in the American lexicon. A very successful private company (dare I say "job creator?") with a very successful search engine formula has reflected that definition in its listings. It would be bad for Google's business to make an exception for Little Rick. If Mr. Santorum doesn't like how a private company orders its search listings, perhaps he can pull himself up by his bootstraps and build a web activist army to defeat Dan Savage's website by generating more links to his own campaign page. It's the American Way!
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