The website sana.sy of the Syrian Arab News Agency has been 'censored' or 'purged' from Google search results. Even after clicking through 10 pages of results, not a single one links to Sana.sy. Contrast with the results from DuckDuckGo and Bing where it's the top result.<p>Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=syrian+arab+news+agency<p>DuckDuckGo: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=syrian+arab+news+agency<p>Bing: http://www.bing.com/search?q=syrian+arab+news+agency<p>This test was conducted based on a post about the Syrian War (http://www.moonofalabama.org/2013/09/a-short-history-of-the-war-on-syria-2006-2014.html#more) which has been posted on HN here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6387286).
Technically it's not purged, 178000 pages are in index:
<a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=site:sana.sy" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/search?q=site:sana.sy</a><p>Perhaps they're downranked, but anyway the first two links on your link leads to wikipedia and facebook pages of that agency which both has direct link to the site in question.<p><a href="http://sana.sy/robots.txt" rel="nofollow">http://sana.sy/robots.txt</a> - oops, no robots.txt. Maybe it's just a results of poor SEO.
To quote from the Wikipedia article about SANA:<p><pre><code> Up until November 2012, SANA's website was hosted in Dallas, Texas by the United States company SoftLayer. Due to sanctions related to the Syrian civil war, which make this hosting illegal, the SoftLayer company was obliged to terminate its hosting responsibilities with SANA.
</code></pre>
I have no idea about the exact legal powers of international (unilateral?) sanctions in the US, but is it possible that Google de-listed SANA because of legal issues?
I asked the crawl/indexing team about this, and it looks like sana.sy hasn't let Google crawl the site since August. It's unclear whether it's deliberate vs. something like timeouts. So it's nothing on Google's side. No webspam-related issues or anything like that, either.<p>In fact, if sana.sy were to register for Google's free webmaster console at google.com/webmasters/ , then they would have gotten automatic alert emails regarding the high level of errors we get when trying to crawl the site.
Technically it may be purged by blackhat SEO, because google search result ranking algorithm is poor actually and can be easily gamed by anyone who has 100 dollars in her pocket.<p>Only because Bing/DDG SERPs were not gamed by "SEO" activity doesn't mean it can't be done and/or those SEs algos are any better than Googles.