Saturday, September 10, 2011

Why did Google (temporarily) let me block microsoft.com from search results?

In the course of researching my posts on Michael Silver, I noticed something interesting in Google.


In my search, I only noticed the "Block all microsoft.com results." I didn't see any similar capability to block results from, say, YouTube. Or Laplink, or ZDNet, or Gartner, or anyone else.

My first suspicion was that a Wikipedia editor was controlling Google, and since my search was on Windows 7, the editor was allowing me to skip Windows 7 items that were obviously written with a biased viewpoint. (I have more thoughts on this.)

My second suspicion was that this was part of the Google-Microsoft (Bing) search war.

Neither suspicion panned out. A few minutes later, I tried the same search again, and was not asked if I wanted to block results from microsoft.com.

So what did I see? I don't know. Do you?
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