Whiggish progress
Here's a pretty old post from the blog archives of Geekery Today; it was written about 19 years ago, in 2005, on the World Wide Web.
Exciting news from the front on Bombing for Choice!
I was going to put up a longer post about this tonight, but I have been a bit distracted and unproductive all day. So: I’ll have more to say about this on the morrow, but as of yesterday evening, a Google search for Roe v. Wade
returns Touro Law Center‘s copy of the Roe v. Wade decision as the number one search result, displacing the anti disinformation site, roevwade-dot-org. The position is holding as of tonight. Fantastic, and thank you to everyone who has taken part in this campaign; it’s been awesome to watch it grow, and it’s awesome to see it beginning to make itself felt.
As of tonight, searches for abortion
are more of a mixed bag: on the plus side, the target that I suggested for GoogleBombing on abortion—GynPages, a no-nonsense online directory of abortion providers–has moved from its old position at #6 up to #4, and now appears above the fold
(no scrolling necessary to find it) at a 1024×768 screen resolution. That’s heartening, but the top spot is still contested territory between the (even-handed) Religious Tolerance page on the abortion debate and the vile abortionfacts-dot-com. (The two have flip-flopped in position since the campaign began, and they seem to have flip-flopped yet again tonight.)
It’s important to keep up the GoogleBombing to point abortion to GynPages, and to encourage others to join if you haven’t already. Here’s why: not only is a website full of misrepresentation and lies vying for the #1 position on Google, almost all of the other top results for abortion
are also sites about the political debate over abortion. They may be agin’ it; they may be for it; they may be remarkably even-handed. But they all tend to crowd out something that’s vitally important: straightforward information on where to find abortion services if you need them. If someone is searching for abortion
because she needs that information, it’s important that she be able to find it easily and without trouble. It’s worth being able to find political yelling about abortion too, of course, but that will still be easy enough to do when the political debate sites are demoted to #2 and below.
In other words: things are looking good. Thank you thank you thank you, and keep it up!
I’m thrilled to see how this idea has spread, and I’m glad to see important factual information win out over disinformation and misrepresentation. We’re most of the way there, and if we keep this up, we are going to win.
More on this–and where we can go from here–tomorrow.
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