You're supposed to tell them that you're Jewish.

What "hindu priests" are you talking about?

Hitchens never "blogged" there or anywhere else. But the domain acquisition does, no doubt, explain it. If you try to go to hitchensweb you do indeed get redirected to the yellowpages site. I haven't yet read the link you provided, but it seems strange that someone should be able to buy reputation just by purchasing a domain and redirecting it. It sounds like a recipe for spam.

Can you provide some insight into how an utterly crude attempt to spam Google works so spectacularly, after all these years of tuning your algorithms to detect just this kind of thing?

I suspect Google doesn't actually want all the spam sites to vanish from their results, because they profit from them: these sites are designed to entice you to click on ads, which leads to revenue for Google. I feel that the ease with which crude spam pages can still rise to the top of the search results is some evidence for this. The old (pre-IPO) Google would of course know that this is not a good long-term stragegy. Today's Google? It wouldn't surprise me.

My problem with Google's attempt to be "social" its that it makes their already spam-infested search results even worse, and it's difficult to opt-out. With all the effort that they claim to expend in fighting spam, why is it still so easy to game their system?

so many top level mathematicians use amphetamines

Do you have a reference for that? I know about Erdos [spelled wrong because Slashdot can not handle Unicode and I'm too lazy (no speed) to see if there is an HTML entity for what should be here], because I read his biography My Brain is Open: he could not do mathematics without speed. But I'd not heard that it was a widespread phenomenon.

you give it to them. If their symptoms go away they need it, else they don't

In fact, it is just this flawed methodology that created the false idea in the minds of researchers that speed was actually helping these children. This false idea is what has led to the current massive overprescription and probable consequent harm to millions of patients.

But when they enthusiastically appease other, extra-legal demands for censorship they sometimes censor results worldwide, including those served to the US. Did you know that when you search on Google or YouTube that the results returned by Google are partly determined by the preferences of various Islamic pressure groups and foreign governments, including Pakistan?

Google censors results in the US in response to political pressure, and lies about it. No laws involved at all.

But it still seems to be trivial to spam the heck out of Google.

A solar physics expert will please correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe CMEs are made of neutral plasma. I don't know where the original article got the " charged gas" description. They are magnetized, like the solar wind, which is why they interact with the earth's magnetic field