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Rick Pleads With Google to End Santorum Problem; Google Says Ask Dan Savage

Posted by on Sep 21, 2011 in The Cunning Linguist | 5 comments

"Ruh-roh."

A very whiny Rick Santorum is pleading with Google to please oh please oh please do something about his search results problem – by biting the hand he is asking to feed him.

Now, the Republican presidential candidate says he’s convinced Google could do something to remedy the issue, if the company wanted to.

“I suspect if something was up there like that about Joe Biden, they’d get rid of it,” Santorum said. “If you’re a responsible business, you don’t let things like that happen in your business that have an impact on the country.”

He continued: “To have a business allow that type of filth to be purveyed through their website or through their system is something that they say they can’t handle but I suspect that’s not true.”

What Santorum fails to realize is that he has nobody to blame for his Google gaffe but himself. The Spreading Santorum website went up in response to Rick’s comments comparing gay sex to “man on dog sex” and incest. A crowdsourced definition of Santorum was decided upon by Dan’s Savage Love readers, but it was the authority building power of the entire internet that made that definition the number one search result for “Santorum.” Kind of like how readers like you have made Unicorn Booty the top search result for “gay blog.” But now we’re just bragging…

In case you missed it, the whole sordid tale received the Taiwanese CGI news treatment last week.

In any case, Google basically told Rick to F off in a curt response.

A Google spokesperson responded to Santorum by advising that users who want “content removed from the Internet should contact the webmaster of the page directly.”

“Google’s search results are a reflection of the content and information that is available on the web. Users who want content removed from the Internet should contact the webmaster of the page directly,” the spokesperson said. “Once the webmaster takes the page down from the web, it will be removed from Google’s search results through our usual crawling process.”

The spokesperson said that Google does not “remove content from our search results, except in very limited cases such as illegal content and violations of our webmaster guidelines.”

To which Dan Savage politely responded with a Santorum-eating grin on his face, “Looking Forward to Hearing From You, Rick.“

(via Politico)