Ain't Nobody Gonna Pay To Reduce Aerosol Transmission - Matter Fact - Don't Even Talk About It!!!

nakedcapitalism |  My most frequent Google use case is searching for posts I know I have written so I can link to them, since searching for them on WordPress causes timeouts, because our database has issues.

Imagine my surprise, then, when yesterday (Sunday, February 28), I searched for the following post from February 18, “CDC School Reopening Guidance Suppresses Aerosols Based on Thin Evidence and Driven by Budgetary Concerns,” (Reopening Guidance) and nothing came up. I then performed a number of other searches for likely keywords, like “aerosol.” Again, no joy. I mentioned this to Yves, who also got no hits, and she said I should check with others, since Google will optimize searches for the individual. I verified that “CDC School Reopening Guidance Suppresses Aerosols” at NC was the first hit on both Bing and DuckDuckGo, sent out my want list for searches to two geographically distributed friends, and sat back to await results in the form of screen shots. I present the results here in tabular form, because a post full of screenshots would not be readable:

Table 1: Google Searches for Reopening Guidance February 28 (Three Users)

Label	Search	Hits for Post
#1	“CDC School Reopening Guidance Suppresses Aerosols” site:www.nakedcapitalism.com	0
#2	CDC schools site:www.nakedcapitalism.com	0
#3	CDC guidance site:www.nakedcapitalism.com	0
#4	walensky site:www.nakedcapitalism.com	0
#5	cdc school re-opening site:www.nakedcapitalism.com Sidebar	0
#6	aerosols site:www.nakedcapitalism.com	0

So, nobody got results for Reopening Guidance, including search #1, on a big chunk of the post title plus the URL for the site.

Now, in the headline I said that Google “suppressed” Reopening Guidance. (I don’t say “censor,” because in my view censorship is properly considered a function of the State, a task of officialdom, and Google is not a State actor, at least not yet.) There are three reasons (besides past behavior) to think that Google did this. When I searched on “CDC School Reopening Guidance Suppresses Aerosols” (search #1, Table 1):

(1) Reopening Guidance was the very first hit in Bing and DuckDuckGo (each of which run search engines independent of Google). That would imply that Google, and only Google, has some secret sauce that causes my post not to appear.

(2) Reopening Guidance appears in “Recent Items” hits (and one internal cross-reference) but there are no hits for the post itself.