Is Google conspiring to bury anti-Obama links on its Trends page?

PrisonPlanet.com, the site responsible for disseminating Charlie Sheen’s President Obama slash fanfic, is alleging that the search giant has conspired to scrub an anti-Obama YouTube clip from its search trends page.

If you’re not familiar with Google’s “hot trends” page, the search engine compiles a list of popular searches hourly, often influenced by stories, clips and images that have gone viral. Google has been known to tinker with the trends in the case of abuses, such as pranks to boost offensive terms in the rankings. (Regardless of reason, terms that rank on the page will garner a certain level of interest merely for being on the list.)

While some seem to be speculating that Google is trying to “cover up” the conspiracy theory, it is far more likely the term, if removed by Google, has been deliberately stricken from Trends due to manipulation by some users:

“However, within half an hour the term had been completely removed by Google and resulted in no news story links. These actions replicated Google’s activity in the days beforehand when it removed other terms such as ‘The Obama Deception’, ‘Infowars’, ‘Fall of the Republic’ and ‘Google Censorship’ – which had all become some of the most searched topics on the internet… Today we urge you to search the term ‘Google Launches Cover Up’ to make this article one of the most widely read on the internet.”

According to an update on PrisonPlanet.com, the steady position of the term “Google launches cover up” on the Trends list indicates that Google has decided not to “(repeat) its previous actions of completely removing the term almost immediately.”