Google: News About Lionbridge Case Censored

international | sci-tech | news report Friday August 15, 2008 10:43 by Cookie Monster

Can corporations censor the Internet?

Google Alert.

On August 13, an update about the case in the Warsaw Labour Court against Lionbridge Poland was published on the website "Anarkismo". News items from this site are generally posted in Google News. This item was also appeared there and could be found by searching with the keyword "Lionbridge". A Google News alert was sent out and the news was posted on other sites with feeds from Google News. By the morning of August 15th, the news item had disappeared.

Is Google censoring the internet?

One interesting fact is that one of Lionbridge's contracts is with Google. Lionbridge contracts what are known as "internet accessors". The Internet accessor's job is to check web search results and to rate search results which are considered irrelevant matches. The idea behind this is to improve the quality of search results.

Are these "irrelevant" results later removed? Who does this: Google or Lionbridge?

Google, as the world's most widely used search engine, has the potential to control access to information on the internet, to make certain stories stand out or even to disappear. We hope that the firm will not turn to abusing this power so that the internet can remain free from the threat of censorship.

News appeared on feeds.

Google News. Already gone.