Tag Archives: search engines

Reviews

The Sunlight Foundation launched a useful tool this summer called Poligraft. It’s an online search engine that lets you input the link of a web article about politics, and gives you the background information on the issue and the politicians involved, including any questionable donations that may have taken place.

Here’s what the Sunlight Foundation has to say about it: “Poligraft uncovers the hidden web of political giving in news stories on the Internet — the patterns of political contributions that aren’t always obvious.”

“Using Poligraft is simple: just type or paste the URL or text of a news article, blog post or press release into it, and Poligraft will automatically scan that text for individual donors, corporations, lobbyists and politicians. Within seconds, you’ll see how they’ve been doing business with each other.  Once Poligraft highlights the names of donors, corporations, lobbyists, or politicians, you can click on those names to learn more. You can even add a Poligraft bookmarklet to your browser toolbar and run any webpage through it.”

This is really cool. You’ll now be able to see right away when some politician is posturing for something that they’ve gotten a hefty donation from that cause. There’ll be no hiding anymore.

Keep politics honest – use Poligraft

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Thoughts

Googling from different countries

I was watching this video on the Google Webmaster Central Channel, where Matt Cutts answers a question about the impact of server location on Google’s rankings, and he touched on an important point, which I hadn’t noticed until I spent a few months in Romania. In the video, he says that Google will return different search results based on which Google site you visit. For example, if you go to Google.com and type in “bank”, you’ll get different search results than if you go to Google.com.au and type in “bank”.

Back in January, when I arrived in Romania, I noticed the same thing. I Googled myself while in Romania, only to find out I was no longer the first search result that came up for my name at Google.ro or at Google.com. I thought that was odd at the time, because doing the same thing while in the US yielded the expected result. It never occurred to me that Google would yield different search results for each country, although that makes perfect sense now.

Here’s the interesting part though. As I spent more time in Romania, writing and publishing to this site, whose server is in the US, from Romania, the order of the search results for my name at Google.ro and Google.com changed. One day, I googled myself and noticed my name came up first, just like it did in the US. So, Google somehow learned — and I’m not sure how they did it — that I was writing from Romania, or that I was in Romania, and figured out that returning my site as the first search result for my name in Romania was the relevant thing to do. If nothing else, it reveals some of the complexity behind Google’s search algorithms and earns my respect.

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