Poor Jason Collins: Google breaks Google Gaydar just in time for his coming out

Last year, I pointed out in Taki's the unintended existence of what I called Google Gaydar. Go to the home page of Google.com and type in the name of a celebrity, then hit the space bar. Google gives you ten possible auto-complete prompts based on what others have typed. If the celebrity is the subject of gay rumors, one of the first prompts will be the word "gay." If that doesn't come up, you can add the letter "g" and see if "gay" comes up. 

For example, Bill Murray got a 0 on Google Gaydar, with the word "gay" never being prompted by Google in either situation. With Kevin Spacey, however, "gay" was the first prompt. 

It was an interesting tool for gauging, for whatever they are worth, public perceptions and rumors, the Undernews.

But now Google has broken Google Gaydar. The prompt system still works, but "gay" won't be offered as prompt. You can type in even "Harvey Fierstein g" and still not get "gay" as a prompt. Today, the first g prompt for the out Broadway actor who often performs in drag is "gerbil" -- that's okay with Google, but "gay" is not. 

Ironically, aged basketball player Jason Collins's carefully choreographed coming out party in the media is snagged on this too: Google's first prompt for "Jason Collins g" is "girlfriend." "Gay" won't come up as a prompt for Collins. Google is trying to force him back into the closet!

Bing Gaydar still seems to work, though.

If you pay attention to Google, you'll notice a lot of oddities like this that come and go. In 2010, I pointed out that Pat Buchanan had been deleted from Google's prompting system. You could type in "Pat Bu" and be prompted with

Pat Burrell
Pat bus schedule
Pat Buttram
Pat Burrell stats
Pat Burns
Pat Burrell wife
Pat Burke
Pat Buckley Moss
Pat Buckley
Pat Burns cancer

But not with the name of the devil incarnate Pat Buchanan. (On Bing, at the time, he was the first prompt.)

Now, however, Pat is back in the good graces of Google Prompt and comes up first.

What happened? Who knows? Nobody was all that interested in asking. My impression is that the media is slightly terrified of Google. The search firm has so much power that all we can do  is hope they live up their motto "Don't be evil," because if they don't, whaddaya whaddaya?

My guess is that these weird events are not generally part of a Conspiracy that Goes All the Way to the Top with Sergey and Larry sitting around deciding who they are going to mess with today.

Instead, my guess is that on the inside, Google is a big ball of twine, with lots of low-level employees having fiefdoms over chunks of the extremely complicated code. If an individual Google worker gets bored and decides to screw with individuals or websites that he doesn't like, he can get away with it for awhile, especially if it's intermittent and thus not always replicable.

For example, I notice that most of the time my posts pop right up in searches, but some fraction of the time, Google forgets about my posts except for my weekly archives. Right now, for example if I type in "Steve Sailer Hart Risley" I get excellent search results to individual posts I've done. Other times, however, I only get links to Blog Archive 10/7/2011 - 10/13/2011 or whatever. This can go on for a few hours, then go back to working right.

Is this just accidental or is some clever Googleite screwing around by creating non-replicable problems for objects of his ire? Who knows? And nobody seems that interested in finding out.