PrisonPlanet.com, the site responsible for disseminating Charlie Sheen’s President Obama slash fanfic, is alleging that the search giant has conspired to scrub an anti-Obama YouTube clip from its search trends page.

If you’re not familiar with Google’s “hot trends” page, the search engine compiles a list of popular searches hourly, often influenced by stories, clips and images that have gone viral. Google has been known to tinker with the trends in the case of abuses, such as pranks to boost offensive terms in the rankings. (Regardless of reason, terms that rank on the page will garner a certain level of interest merely for being on the list.)

While some seem to be speculating that Google is trying to “cover up” the conspiracy theory, it is far more likely the term, if removed by Google, has been deliberately stricken from Trends due to manipulation by some users:

“However, within half an hour the term had been completely removed by Google and resulted in no news story links. These actions replicated Google’s activity in the days beforehand when it removed other terms such as ‘The Obama Deception’, ‘Infowars’, ‘Fall of the Republic’ and ‘Google Censorship’ – which had all become some of the most searched topics on the internet… Today we urge you to search the term ‘Google Launches Cover Up’ to make this article one of the most widely read on the internet.”

According to an update on PrisonPlanet.com, the steady position of the term “Google launches cover up” on the Trends list indicates that Google has decided not to “(repeat) its previous actions of completely removing the term almost immediately.”

Is Google conspiring to bury anti-Obama links on its Trends page? is a post from: The Inquisitr

Remember back in the summer when that screenshot was making the rounds that appeared to suggest, via Google search suggestions, that black people were more likely to steal cars than white ones?

Google is again being accused of search suggestion bias, this time with a question about Google and Islam. By now, pretty much everyone knows you can type “(variable) is” into the Google search box and receive a host of inane results suggested based on previous searches. Using the simple substitution of “pineapple juice,” for example, leads results with “pineapple juice sperm taste.”

Typing in “Christianity is” at the search box yields a host of bizarre and possibly offensive results, as does “Judaism is” or “Buddhism is.” However, changing the search query to “Islam is” yields nothing. Nada. Not even “Islam is a religion of peace” or “Islam is a common religion in…” Try it, and let me know in the comments if that changes.

UPDATE: Google confirms the results and blames a “bug” for the disparity.

Is Google scared of Islam? is a post from: The Inquisitr

Google’s still feeling all announcey, with the addition of something called “living stories” to its repertoire of announcements over the past few days.

The project looks like the Google News topic pages got drunk and shagged Wikipedia, and the result is a hybrid results page that condenses the hell out of results to give users an overview of any given topic. Google’s got a rundown on their blog explaining the initiative, teaming up with the New York Times and the Washington Post to present a couple of sample topics for Living Stories.

Blogging in general has been a bit of an influence, with a heavily hyperlinked summary at the top of the page:

Below that is a menu on the left side, allowing users to focus on certain aspects of a story: Events, Articles, People, Quotes, Resources, Images, Videos, Audio, Graphics and Opinion are the choices currently listed:

Interesting especially is the inclusion of the two big print news names, the Washington Post and the New York Times. It may signal a coming larger acceptance on the part of print media to bend or break now, to change revenue models before it’s too late. (If it isn’t already.) Google addresses this in the first paragraph of the post, basically acknowledging that they’re at the center of the issue and ha, ha, ha!, they’re totally running with it!

The interface is truly cool, limiting the legwork needed for casual users to get much more dynamic, relevant results. (For instance, once you visit, some of the information you’ve seen becomes greyed out so new to you tidbits are easily recognizable- try that with your newsprint, Chicago Sun-Times.) There’s a video below from the Google blog, and here’s how they described it in their own words:

The idea behind Living Stories is to experiment with a different format for presenting news coverage online. News organizations produce a wealth of information that we all value; access to this information should be as great as the online medium allows. A typical newspaper article leads with the most important and interesting news, and follows with additional information of decreasing importance. Information from prior coverage is often repeated with each new online article, and the same article is presented to everyone regardless of whether they already read it. Living Stories try a different approach that plays to certain unique advantages of online publishing. They unify coverage on a single, dynamic page with a consistent URL. They organize information by developments in the story. They call your attention to changes in the story since you last viewed it so you can easily find the new material. Through a succinct summary of the whole story and regular updates, they offer a different online approach to balancing the overview with depth and context.

Google still on announcing kick, now introducing “living stories” is a post from: The Inquisitr

Unlike the “white people stole my car” Google joke, this one works.

If you go to Google and type “find Chuck Norris” into the search box, then hit “I’m feeling lucky,” hilarity ensues. If you’re not tired of the Chuck Norris meme. “I’m feeling lucky” automatically brings you to the first page of results- in this case, a page made to look like a failed search on Google. After giving you the option to search the web or “Chuck’s beard,” this text is displayed:

Google won’t search for Chuck Norris because it knows you don’t find Chuck Norris, he finds you.

No standard web pages containing all your search terms were found.

Your search - Chuck Norris – did not match any documents.

Suggestions:

• Run, before he finds you
• Try a different person

Google bombs and search result jokes are a long standing internet tradition. For a few days after the Iraq War began in 2003, googling for “weapons of mass destruction” returned a fake 404 error page that was pretty clever. And famously, for a time, googling “miserable failure” and clicking “I’m feeling lucky” sent you to George W. Bush’s Wikipedia page.

Google jokes: Find Chuck Norris is a post from: The Inquisitr

Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, has noticed some significant, promising changes trending since March.

Unemployment searches are down, real estate searches are up, and temporary employment (which often is a pre-indicator for a recovery in the permanent kind) is improving, for starters. Varian, who joined Google seven years ago to help design their now $21 billion yearly ad business, was in Washington last week to entice the government to use Google to “better draw current snapshots of consumer sentiment, corporate health and social interests.” Which would be incredibly useful if they’re not doing it already- people are notoriously poor at providing accurate information about themselves, whether through intentional means (lying), misunderstanding questions, or optimism, for example. But Google doesn’t lie. Statistical data drawn from user search trends and habits are much less likely to reflect prejudice or misinformation provided by those being profiled based on that criteria.

Varian points to the “cash for clunkers” short-sightedness that has drawn much critique. Had the government used data from Google metrics to gauge interest in the program, he says, perhaps they may have known the money would run out as quickly as it did. While Varian’s conclusions may not differ all that much from those being drawn by non-Googling economists, the mere fact that the statistical data mined from Google is so rich and nuanced is reason alone that the search engine’s data is valuable to show us what is and possibly, what is to be.

In perhaps the most reassuring prediction I’ve seen so far, Varian believes recovery is coming. He Googled it.

With more stability in the economy, Varian said more help for private companies, such as tax incentives, could help spur an earnest recovery.

“On the other hand, I would hesitate to say we need any more major initiatives at this point,” he said. “The die is cast and things seem to be moving in the right direction. Let’s stay the course.”

[Source: The Washington Post]

Google searches indicate economy is recovering. Slowly. is a post from: The Inquisitr

For the past day, Google’s main logo has been replaced with one featuring a flying saucer.

Clicking on the image pulls up a search for “unexplained phenomenon,” but there’s no discernable reason why Google is marking today and yesterday. The UK’s telegraph did a short piece on the trend, but I think their speculation about marking the UK release of District 9 is off- not only is Google more apt to mark an American release, but I’ve never known them to mark the release of any movie with a logo change.

One likely reason is in commemoration of the 44th anniversary of UFO sightings in Exeter, NH (full story after the jump):

An extremely well-documented and investigated UFO case of close encounters occurred in Exeter, New Hampshire in 1965. This case would make a huge impact on Ufology, and mainstream media as well. The Exeter events would be chronicled in an excellent book by investigative writer John G. Fuller, titled, “Incident at Exeter.” Look magazine also ran a two-part series on the events, bringing the case to the minds of millions of people.

A Light Becomes an Object:The events at Exeter began as eighteen-year-old Norman Muscarello was hitching for a ride on the cold night of September 3, 1965. He was on Route 150 heading for the small New England town of Exeter, population 7,000, at 2:00 AM. As he walked along, he suddenly noticed an unusual light glowing in the dark skies. The light soon became an object, and headed straight toward the hitchhiker.

Even more curious is the unexplained phenomenon of a Twitter post by Google. An encrypted message that read “1.12.12 25.15.21.18 15 1.18.5 2.5.12.15.14.7 20.15 21.19″ was sent out to followers of Google on Twitter. Decoded, the unexplained phenomenon message reads “all your o are belong to us”. Although the message is far from grammatically correct, it fits with the UFO that is beaming up one of the Google ”O”s in today’s Google images.

Google celebrates the “Unexplained Phenomenon,” but why? is a post from: The Inquisitr

For the past week, the phrase “white people stole my car” has been Googled like crazy.

Perplexingly, though, there were few results yielded by this popular search and most links lead to some fairly nasty malware. Finally, the above screenshot surfaced, which seems to at least solve the mystery of why the phrase was so popular on Google. As the screenshot above implies, Googling the term “white people stole my car” results in the search engine asking if black people stole my car. Well that’s… really not cool, Google!

But is it real or fake? As of now, Google does not correct the phrase in a racially insensitive way. And while it does appear that at one time Google did, it’s entirely possible and plausible that someone misspelled “black people stole my car,” got the correction shown, and altered the search text as a prank.

I tried to re-fake a screenshot, but it seems that Google is not correcting any searches to say “black people stole my car” anymore. Bummer.

[Source: Snopes message boards]

Real or fake? “White people stole my car” is big on Google is a post from: The Inquisitr

The utility lets you chart out traffic for any site and even break down visits by geographic region. You can also compare multiple sites on one line graph. Perhaps one of the handiest features for developers, though, is the ability to see additional sites visited and queries searched by people who viewed the page in question.

For example, if you do a data analysis of The Inquisitr, you’ll see that people who come here also go to exactcenteroftheinternet.com — curious — as well as to flickabooger.com. Huh…okay.

In a slightly more understandable result, you can see that people accessing this site also searched for “twitter.”

An interesting new tool from Google, no doubt. Now, though, time to go see what this flickabooger.com is all about…

Google Unveils New Website Traffic Tool is a post from: The Inquisitr