More mainstream media spin

If you do a search for “mocality” on google.com, then my first question to you is: Why do you do any search on google.com? The results are obviously biased towards returning positive results for Google’s partners, and negative results for those who are not yet tipsy-topsy from drinking mass quantities of google koolaid.

Yet, if you are so illiterate that you actually feel meaningful information can be acquired from such an exercise in futility, then this is — more or less — what you will get:

• Something bad out of Africa (top news result)
• Mocality Business Directory Kenya – Find and be found
• Google, what were you thinking? ← Mocality Kenya
• Sign in to Mocality
• All businesses | Mocality
• Mocality
• Google ‘improperly’ accessed Kenyan rival Mocality’s database …
• Sources: Google’s Mocality-scraping actions ‘not condoned’ | The …
• A “Mortified” Google Apologizes To Mocality For Poaching …
• Mocality.com – Twitter
• Google ‘Improperly’ Accessed Rival Mocality’s Database | News …

These are the so-called “top 10″ results — the news result at the top is an “additional bonus”. Note that the top news result says the problem is in Africa, not in Mountain View, California.

Half of the results are, indeed, the result most people were probably looking for (perhaps this is an attempt Google is making to “play nice”) — but under the heading of “Something bad out of Africa”, these listings are at the very least tainted (if not downright defamatory).

One of the other 5 results is from twitter.com — a google partner website (it is somewhat odd that there are no results from other Google partner websites — such as wikipedia.org — or Google owned websites — such as youtube.com).

Of the other 4 results, only 1 doesn’t misrepresent the main issue being talked about across the web: that Google has been caught red-handed in poaching.

None of the results (besides the link to the mocality blog itself) state what is well-documented in the mocality blog: that Google representatives misrepresented (i.e. lied) about a relationship they maintained Google had with mocality.

So to get information about mocality, I suggest you do not waste your time with google. Why not go to the horse’s mouth? mocality.com