If you've used Google, you've probably noticed the "autosuggest" feature. Type a few letters, and a drop-down box appears of phrases which might complete your search term. For example, if you type "tekt" you'll get several suggestions, including "tektronix" and "tektronix oscilloscope."

Now try typing "climategat" (without the final "e"). All you get is "climate guatemala" (4,180,000 results) and "climate guatemala city" (1,120,000 results), even though g-a-t doesn't spell "guatemala." And yet if you search for "climategate" in full, you'll see over 20 million results (as of this writing). I've found no subset of "climategate" which actually causes Google to suggest "climategate". (One suggestion for "clim" was "climatemaster" with only 99,100 results.) Even typing "climategate" in full leads only to those "guatemala" suggestions.

Several people have reported this peculiar occurrence; Talking About the Weather decided to investigate (and dubbed it "Google-gate"). His query got a response from a lower-level flunky who claimed the term had not been removed from the suggestions -- though Google does admit to that capability; they remove pornographic suggestions. Instead the flunky suggested "The suggestions change dynamically over time through automated processes based on relevance algorithms." As if climategate suddenly wasn't relevant, or hasn't gone from zero to 20 million hits in the space of only two weeks.

I'm hard-pressed to think of an algorithm which would suppress this automatically, unless Google's brain trust has been working on a don't-embarass-the-bigwigs-of-Google algorithm. It seems that one of Google's senior advisors is...Al Gore.

P.S. Google News does suggest "climate gate" after typing "cli". There are (currently) 595 results for "climate gate". Interestingly, there are 3,366 results for "climategate" as one word, though that word is never suggested.