“Climategate” surpasses “Global Warming” on Google

Watts Up With That?
Sunday, Nov 29th, 2009

Note: title suffix – “autosuggest still blocked” has been removed, see update2 at bottom of story.

We’ve had the term “global warming” in the lexicon since well before the Internet became a household tool, certainly well before Google itself.

So it is with amazement that I report the rise of a new term, “Climategate” in just a little over 1 week in the Google search engine.

Here’s our old friend “global warming”:

And here is the new term that is spreading like lightning, “climategate”:

global warming – 10,100,000

climategate – 10,400,000

Note that these are web searches, not news searches, but Google suggests a few news stories first. These two searches were conducted about 1 minute apart.

Individual results and search permutations may vary, but it sure seems like “climategate” has grown virally in since the story on the CRU files broke on November 19th.

Here are some other interesting tidbits about “climategate”.

Google seems to be blocking their search box suggestions from using the word, reports on WUWT and my own observation two days ago indicate it was once there. I used by upper right Google Search Box in IE8 to find out.

For example “global war….” has lots of suggestions:

And so does “climate”:

I find it interesting that climate depot and climate audit are suggested ahead of climate progress.

But even when you spell out almost the enirety of “climategate” Google doesn’t seem to think it’s worth suggesting to you:

With “climategate” now as big as, likely even bigger than “global warming” on the web, Google might want to rethink this.

UPDATE: From comments I see that “Bing”, the new search engine from Microsoft, has no such problems, and in fact puts “climategate” right at the top after only 3 letters “c l i”:

click for larger image

I thought the Langjokull Glacier in Iceland was a nice touch. Bing apparently rotates backgrounds, so who knows what you’ll see.

UPDATE2: About 3 hours after this story was first posted, it appears that Google has added the word “climategate” to autosuggest.