Check out a post from James Annan, who details how, out of 438 documents on Whitehouse.gov the contain the phrase "global warming," only a single one is returned when using the Whitehouse.gov search engine.
Color me stupefied. It's almost like they are trying to hide something. On purpose even. Who'da thunk it?
[Update] As most of you probably know, this may be one of those "don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence" moments. (see more detailed update here).I'd have to say that in analyzing the current Whitehouse policy on just about anything, figuring out which it is, malice or incompetence, is a black art.
Of course, the end result is one and the same, from Katrina to Iraq to fiscal policies to the environment to homeland security to international diplomacy to...
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Biodiversivist Posted 8:49 am
01 Feb 2007
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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tico89 Posted 10:20 am
01 Feb 2007
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raines Posted 11:13 am
01 Feb 2007
(with links here, of course, thanks for helping get the word out on it. Anyone grab any screen shots?)
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tico89 Posted 12:39 pm
01 Feb 2007
Interestingly, "global climate change" (which, of course, doesn't specify whether it's warming, cooling, or a happy combination of the two) comes up with 230 hits (on the White House search engine). "Global climate change" is a nice way of twisting "global warming" so that it sounds inevitable, natural, and less dangerous, so it is hardly surprising that this is a much more popular phrase than "global warming". Sigh.
By the way, I turned up this on the site, looking for "Global Warming". I can't help wondering what's happened in the last 5 and a half years.
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Biodiversivist Posted 1:14 pm
01 Feb 2007
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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raines Posted 2:42 pm
01 Feb 2007
R (preferring "Global Climate Crisis" myself)
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tadamsmar Posted 6:16 am
02 Feb 2007
"Don't worry about missing a document because it doesn't have one of the words in your search -- your search returns relevant results even if they don't contain all query terms"
http://www.whitehouse.gov/help/?la=en&text=0
A ...
If it's tags, then they are tagging "issue of global" but not tagging "issue of global warming" or "global warming". That is not plausible.
I will post these arguments over at kos as soon as my 24 hour waiting period for a kos account is over.
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tadamsmar Posted 6:17 am
02 Feb 2007
"First off, there are some curious patterns in the whitehouse.gov search engine. It turns out that it has been blocked from returning most results if the search phrase includes "global warming" - even if it's from the President himself. For instance, searching for "issue of global" gives as top result the President's Rose Garden speech in June 2001 on Global Climate Change, but searching for "issue of global warming" (which of course is the full phrase used) returns nothing. Hmmm....."
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/02/qui ...
If it's tags, then they are tagging "issue of global" but not tagging "issue of global warming" or "global warming". That is not plausible.
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amazingdrx Posted 6:56 am
02 Feb 2007
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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tadamsmar Posted 8:01 pm
03 Feb 2007
"Global Warming" does find more than "global warming". But it seems to find the upper case usages in the text. It finds only one press briefing where "Global Warming" appears with caps. Goggle reveals 70 where global warming is used. Or it could be that "Global Warming" is used as a tag and only one press briefing is tagged and the full text search is being censored.
The help page says the lower case searched are case insensitive and upper case searches are case sensitive, but clearly is does not work as documented.
Clearly, the search engine has problems, but that does not mean they are not blocking "global warming" from full text searches. The two are not mutually exclusive.
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