The Disappearing Blog Post About Spouse Killings

Two weeks ago, I wrote “about convicted felon Teressa Turner-Schaefer, who spent a mere 11 months in jail for killing her husband after an argument. Now Turner-Schaefer gets to collect $400,000 in life insurance for killing her husband.” This husband-killer was treated indulgently based on gender bias. Other commentators also criticized the slap on the wrist that she received.

(I noted that the average sentence for an unprovoked killing of a husband is only 6 or 7 years, whereas the killing of a wife leads to a more reasonable average sentence of 17 years).

Weirdly enough, although many other web sites linked to my blog post, it has entirely disappeared from the Google search results, while obscure, seldom-read blogs that reprinted my post without attribution are still listed by Google. (It still shows up in the Yahoo search results).

My blog post was first omitted from Google’s regular search results based on the fact that it was similar to other posts (because those posts quoted it in its entirety, some without attribution), even though those posts were by non-lawyers, while I have practiced law and have extensively studied the role of gender bias in the legal system. Later, my post disappeared entirely from all of Google’s search results.

By contrast, obscure blog posts I have written about Indonesia and tobacco regulation show up on Google. How Google’s search engines work is a mystery to me.