Daily Kos and Google Searches

The Daily Kos has figured out how to get voters reading the most negative stories about Republican candidates in closest 98 congressional races. They are going to drive up the rankings of negative stories about the candidates so that voters doing research on who to vote for will see the negative stories. As of 3 PM on Saturday, Daily Kos readers identified actual or possibly acceptable negative news articles about the Republican candidates that meant their requirements that they could up the Google rankings. Here is a nice synopsis of what they are planning on doing.

“…as a group, we need to find and choose the damaging articles on Republican candidates that we want undecided voters to read. It is only after finding the articles that we can push them up search engine rankings. As such, finding those articles is the main purpose of this diary. (We are targeting House campaigns since Senate campaigns are so much more difficult to influence, due to their extensive media coverage."

Next they want participants to do their own searches and find the most damaging articles they can with these stipulations:

Title damaging in and of itself. Not many people who see the article will actually click through and read it.
Name of candidate in title. In addition to a catchy title, it is key that the name of the candidate appear in the title itself.
...Find negative articles from as high profile a news organization as possible. When high profile can’t be found, then local news outlets will do just fine. Whatever you find, make sure said news organization is at least ostensibly claims to be non-partisan.
...Already has a high Google ranking. Increasing the visibility of the article will be a lot easier if the article already has a decent Google ranking. For our purposes, top 100 is OK, and top 50 is good. Something already in the top 20, or even the top 10, would be awesome. (Note: make sure you sign out of Google before conducting keyword searches on the candidate’s full name to test the Google ranking of the article).
Name of candidate in URL. The SEO effort will be greatly enhanced if the name of the candidate appears in the URL of the article.
Keep it short... Keep it recent…

Once the participant finds good (for their purposes) articles they are to send it to the folks at the daily Kos, who will publish the list for all the participants to publish, tweet, Facebook etc.

“That’s it. Once we get the articles we can start working to push them up search engine rankings. We need to launch the campaign early next week, so let’s gather these articles as quickly as we can.”

Google appears to have more directly been involved in manipulating the political debate in the past. They have been accused in the past of "purging Conservative news sites." Al Gore has been a Senior Advisor to Google.

Now Gore and MoveOn are, if not joined at the hip, at least extremely simpatico. Gore also sits on the board of Google. Its $600 a share stock has made him so rich he could fund his own presidential campaign with one check.

Why do you think Google has denied Republican Collins ad space to fight back against MoveOn, which is trying to put her out of business?

Google says her ad against MoveOn violates some policy or other and they have to tell her no. Translation: It's Al Gore's Google in this situation and Al Gore is more interested in MoveOn getting its anti-Bush, anti-war message out there than helping a Republican fight the Soros MoveOn machine to hold onto to her Senate seat.

MoveOn has been a very, very Clinton-centric organization, of course. But do you think maybe, just maybe, MoveOn might be interested in the candidacy of the environmental saint Al Gore if she should stumble? . . .

The amazing thing is that the Daily Kos is so open about this. I can't find any statement by Google responding to this. In any case, here is a copy of the Daily Kos discussion just in case they ever decide to remove the post (click on pictures to make them larger).