I have a question for you, and it is a straightforward one, but I cannot figure out how to get it through to you. I went through many of your pages in search of an electronic-mail address, but without any success. Even though you offer plenty of access points to your customers, none of them fit my case. I am neither buying nor selling anything, that is. In the end, I decided to send you an open letter, which I will post on the World Wide Web. Chances are that I will never hear from you, but someone else may find my question and help me figure out the answer.

My question has to do with the search on your browser. A bit more than a week ago, I wrote and posted on my Residua website a piece entitled “Ten Principles of Disaster Management” (January 19, 2015). It can be found without any trouble on my site, but it cannot be found by searching via your browser. Whenever I attempt it, I only get three of my earlier pieces with “ten principles” in their titles. Even if I search for the title of the last piece within quotation marks, which indicates that I am looking for the exact wording, I get your message to the effect that no results fitting these words can be found on the World Wide Web. A quick visit to my site shows this to be wrong, though.

So, what is going on? Is my search incomprehensible to your browser? Or is this piece of mine being censored for some reason? If so, why and by whom? I cannot imagine it would be you, but neither can I fathom who else would be up to such shenanigans. I do acknowledge that the piece is apocalyptical in nature, for it spells out the end of our civilization on account of climate change, but this is not a sufficient reason to censor it. Quite the opposite, I reckon, for disaster management is the only course of action still open to the human race.

In closing, I must admit that I am becoming a bit paranoid about the World Wide Web. Who knows what is going on behind our backs? Everything we have learned from Edward Snowden suggests that the coming cyberwar is already upon us. And in earnest. Both spying and all manner of subterfuge are becoming ever more common. Nonetheless, I would gladly acknowledge my paranoia if there were a coherent answer to my question. Say, my piece about disaster management got lost in space. Otherwise, my paranoia cannot but be enhanced by my own experience with your browser. Mind you, I have gone through the search at least a dozen times.

Addendum I (January 28, 2015)

As soon as I finished writing this piece yesterday evening, I sent it by electronic mail to Jason Pontin, the editor of the MIT Technology Review. Actually, I put a link to it into the message, and put “FYI” into the subject box by way of explanation. This morning I found his reply. “To be honest,” he writes, “it may be the odd way the Residua is built.” But then he added that he would send the piece around to his social media followers. He used Tweeter once again, and there was a surge of visits to my website according to Google Analytics. I thanked him and added that the site uses Word Press as the foundation since 2008. Besides, I mentioned that all other searches work without a glitch. Perhaps one of Jason’s followers will come up with an explanation to the conundrum, but this morning I discovered that my letter to Google does not come up in searches for ten principles of disaster management, either. Quotation marks do not help a single bit.

Addendum II (January 29, 2015)

I forwarded this piece together with the first addendum to Paul Bazay, who turned my Residua website into a blog in 2008. I just got his reply, and it sounds perfectly plausible to me. “It’s likely that Google hasn’t indexed your page yet,” he argued. Having checked some other pieces on my site, he suggested that the cutoff date was around a fortnight ago. All pieces posted earlier than that have been indexed already. “So,” he concluded, “it’s just a matter of time.” Once again, my paranoia seems to be just that, paranoia. Whenever anything goes wrong with my magnum opus, I imagine all sorts of shenanigans pointed my way. Put differently, I imagine my writings to be much more important than they actually are. Or ever could be, for that matter. My most sincere thanks, Paul!

Addendum III (February 2, 2015)

Once again, Paul was right. I kept searching for the title of my piece on disaster management within quotation marks, and today I got it for the first time. So, it takes Google about a fortnight to index the stuff put on the World Wide Web. Phew! If only I could get rid of my paranoia as easily as this…