Wednesday was a difficult day for The American Independent News Network, which is the larger entity that operates The Iowa Independent. Our chief executive and founder announced two of our sister sites would close and their content would be moved to The American Independent.
A recently introduced bill could have far-reaching impact on the U.S. sugar industry, including American Crystal Sugar, a farmer-owned cooperative that locked out 1,300 Midwest workers on Aug. 1.
The chairman for Herman Cain’s Iowa effort says the campaign “relied more on the word of farmers than Washington regulators” in deciding to run an ad containing claims the Environmental Protection Agency says are false.
The Iowa Senate will remain under the control of a slim 26-25 Democratic majority when it reconvenes in January 2012.
If anyone has a reason to hate Google, the world’s largest Internet search engine, it would be former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pennsylvania).
In 2003, Santorum became the victim of a ‘Google Bomb’ — a tactic designed to manipulate Google search rankings for certain keywords in order to make someone or something less appealing. Santorum’s Google Bomb was perhaps the most successful (and the most sexually explicit) Google Bomb in history, serving as an example that online activists continue to try to replicate today.
And yet when the former Keystone state senator was in Iowa yesterday, he all but asked a member of the Iowa press corps to Google him.
Here’s what he told O. Kay Henderson, in reference to the rumors sparked by his visit to the leadoff presidential caucus state:
If you Googled ‘Santorum in Iowa’ before I did that Politico interview, there were 350 items would come up, entries that would come up on the search. I Googled it this morning. You know how many came up? Guess….1,360,000 entries!
Santorum is right, there are now a lot more entries for “Santorum in Iowa” than there were a few weeks ago. And luckily for him, the Google Bomb no longer seems to be affecting more than a few of the top ten results.
But take out the “in Iowa” part of the search query, and you’ll still find the sexually explicit results Santorum probably doesn’t want you to see, right at the top of the page. He would be wise to stop mentioning Google to reporters altogether, because it could lead to some awkward lines of questioning…
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