Where Did We Go?

You can find almost anything you want on the internet via search engines. We don't understand all the dynamics behind it, but the big companies have specially designed "web crawlers" that scan billions of pages and categorize them according to popularity, providing users with wanted information.

Google is the biggest of these search engines, generating some $10 billion in revenue annually. The company and its founders are very liberal in their politics and donations. They've also run into criticisms, mostly from conservative sites, that they manipulate and hide data and have a decidedly anti-American bent to their main search page. Witness earlier this month on Labor Day where they placed a tiny American flag at the bottom of their site. All well and good except that they have huge interactive banners for all sorts of nonsense anniversaries (you can see them at this link here). They also caved into Chinese demands concerning their programming (The Great Firewall of China) and may have assisted in identifying "subversives" that Chinese authorities subsequently jailed.

Why do we bring this up?

Well, for some reason, if you type "Second City Cop" or "Second City Cop Blog" in a Google search box, guess what you don't get? If you said, "A link to this site," you'd be completely correct. In fact, we googled both phrases and couldn't find a direct link to this site in the first 50 results at all. Yes, there were mentions of the blog, but they were secondary links from other sites, like The Chicagoist, HillBuzz, Crimefile, Shaved, assorted news sites and pretty much anyone who has linked back to us over the past 6 years. Just last week, those first few pages were filled with direct links to SecondCityCop.

So what gives? This appears to be a concerted effort by someone to minimize the significance of the blog. We have no idea why a $10 billion-a-year company that purports to deliver information to the masses would take it upon themselves to blacklist a site that pulls in maybe 15,000 hits a day on a good day, but we can only assume that they have. Are we pissing off Rahm that much? Is Garry calling in favors? Has the wrath of J-Fled finally reached a peak that he can control the internet?

Backtracking a bit, it may have started around the time we supported Georgia's execution of a convicted cop killer - is this an example of Google's chilling effect on those of a more conservative bent? We support Second Amendment Rights and are avid fans of the NRA and like minded organizations. Could this have something to do with our political views?

We have no answers at this point, and no easy way to gather any. Maybe some of our readers want to poke around. We aren't going to hold our breath that the media might make something of this - they'd never lift a finger to help a blogger, let alone a conservative one. And Google is a private company that has caved in to Communist China. We don't particularly care as this doesn't affect us financially and our readers are smart enough to find us using competing search engines like Yahoo or Bing or something else. We still appear there in the top spots.