Once we proved in the previous visualization how the Streisand effect is an effective mechanism working for the pieces of information on the web, we wanted to analyze more deeply the case of Mario Costeja Gonzaléz and its recurrency throughout the pages that have been wrote since the first appeareance of his name. And to do so we decide to use Google Search.
The two facing columns are two parallel displays of the same set of information. We wanted to show what the Google Search results give back to the query “Mario Costeja Gonzaléz”, to do so we mimic the pagination of Google.com, indeed each row of the column contains ten blocks, where each one of them is a page result, only in the left column the square’s colour refers to the year of publication, while in the right column it points to the main topic of the page, to do so we divided the pages into these categories:
News sites
Academics
Online laws and rights
Informatic and digital themes
General personal blog
Social
Public institutions
Wikipedia pages
Others
Scrolling down the page we see two following visualizations in which the blocks of the previous graphs have been aggregated according to the year of publication, in order to clearly quantify and all the pages generated afterward athe two original LaVanguardia articles, and in which kind of websites tMr. Gonzalez has been called up.
We searched "Mario Costeja Gonzales" in Google.com and once we had all 600 and more results, we proceeded to categorize them all, indicating the year each article was published, and the website category of all of them (news sites, academics, informatics, general blog, social, public institutions, wikipedia…) and of course those La Vanguardia articles that were the cause of Mario Costeja legal odyssey.
We can surely affirm that the case of Mr. Gonzalez whose purpose was to erase completely any references to his name, brought him a lot of unwanted publicity, since his case also generated a whole new European legislation, developed in the following years, therefore his name appears in hundreds and hundreds of websites, either belonging to the digital/technology blogosphere, or to legal or consulting portals, and news websites.
