The chancellor of UC Davis university has apologised over the hiring of a PR firm that promised to bury online search results about the pepper spraying of peaceful protesters.   Dr Linda Katehi admitted that UC Davis, California, brought in a company “specialising in what is known as search engine optimisation”.  But she denied that the institution had sought to “rewrite history”.  UC Davis hired the PR firm Nevins and Associates on a six-month contract at $15,000 per month.

Source: BBC Technology

Date: April 23rd, 2016

Link: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36102959

Discussion

1) Is it ethical, or not, to bury search results about an embarrassing or illegal event such as this?

2) The article gives a lot of details about to go about burying search results.  One of them is that you host your new content on Google’s servers as Google ranks content stored on Google servers higher than on other servers.  Is this ethical of Google?