When 911Truth.org Was a Top-Five Google Result for “9/11”
Independent academic research documented the extraordinary reach of 911Truth.org in 2007—and captured the moment the site abruptly disappeared from Google’s search results.
In September 2007, a line on an academic research chart fell almost straight off the page.
For roughly six months, 911Truth.org had ranked among Google’s first five results for the search “9/11.” Then, on September 18, its position collapsed—first to roughly 200, then beyond the first 1,000 results Google would return.
The researchers recording it were not affiliated with 911Truth.org.
They were studying Google.
Their work would later appear in a peer-reviewed journal and in Richard Rogers’ 2013 MIT Press book Digital Methods.
Their work would later appear in a peer-reviewed journal and in Richard Rogers’ 2013 MIT Press book Digital Methods.
The surviving record tells another story as well: just how visible the 9/11 Truth movement had become on the early web.
A grassroots site near the top of Google
In 2007, Richard Rogers and researchers associated with Govcom.org and the University of Amsterdam were developing a system called the Issue Dramaturg.
Rather than taking a single snapshot of Google, the project stored search results over time so researchers could observe which sources rose, fell, remained stable or disappeared.
For the query “9/11,” they followed three sources in particular:
- the New York City government;
- The New York Times;
- and 911Truth.org.
The result was striking.
From approximately March through September 2007, 911Truth.org routinely appeared among Google’s first five results for “9/11.” Rogers later reported that the New York City government and The New York Times were both below result 50 during that period.
It is independent evidence of the movement’s reach.
At the time, a person entering one of the broadest possible searches about September 11 into the world’s dominant search engine could encounter 911Truth.org before some of the country’s largest institutional news and government sources.
The site was already seeing something unusual
911Truth.org did not know that Rogers’ researchers were independently recording its Google position.
On September 25, 2007, the site published “Google Doesn’t Like 911Truth.org.”
The article reported something even stranger than losing placement for the general search “9/11”: when staff searched Google for “911truth.org,” the site’s own homepage did not appear where expected.
Competing search engines returned the site normally.
The article also recorded an Alexa traffic rank of 118,306 and reported that Alexa showed the percentage of global internet users reaching 911Truth.org had risen 29 percent over the preceding three months.
This was not a tiny website disappearing because nobody was visiting it.
By late 2006, the web had passed 100 million websites. Against that backdrop, an Alexa rank of 118,306 helps put the scale of 911Truth.org’s reach into historical perspective: the site ranked within roughly the top 0.12% of websites worldwide by traffic.
Our 2007 article concluded that Google had deliberately removed the site.
That conclusion went beyond what the evidence available at the time could establish.
What 911Truth.org did not know was that an independent research project had already captured the underlying event.
Read the original report:
Google Doesn’t Like 911Truth.org
Rogers’ chart captured the collapse
The Issue Dramaturg chart shows months of relative stability followed by a sudden break.
911Truth.org—line B—remained near the top of Google’s results for “9/11.”
Then it dropped sharply.
In his 2010 peer-reviewed article, Rogers wrote that he had been tracking Google results for the query “9/11” for about two years, collecting as many as the first 1,000 results. He reported that 911Truth.org had remained in the top five for approximately six months before falling around September 17 from about result five to 200 and then beyond the first 1,000.
Rogers wrote that he believed this was the first fully documented case of the apparent disappearance of a site from Google results apart from legal removals.
Six years later, he returned to the case in Digital Methods, published by MIT Press.
There he again described 911Truth.org’s top-five position from March through September 2007 and its sudden fall to roughly 200 and then beyond Google’s first 1,000 results. He characterized it as one of the earliest fully documented cases of an apparent website removal from Google.
A website disappears—and returns
The September disappearance was not permanent at that point.
In Rogers’ December 2008 paper, The Googlization Question, and the Inculpable Engine, he reported that 911Truth.org returned roughly two weeks later to its usual top placement.
The evidence therefore does not support describing the September 2007 event simply as a permanent deletion from Google.
Rogers considered an algorithmic explanation. Around the anniversary, movement and affiliated sites may have generated an unusual concentration of links to 911Truth.org. Google’s anti-spam systems could have interpreted that pattern as excessive reciprocal linking or another form of artificial link activity.
By 2010, Rogers said he believed the episode was a false positive for Google, while explicitly acknowledging that he did not know the company’s internal reason for the change.
That remains the evidentiary boundary.
The ranking collapse is documented.
The short-term recovery is documented.
Google’s internal reason for either event is not.
The later history remains open
Rogers’ published work tells us that the research project continued tracking “9/11” results for roughly two years. But the papers and book reviewed here do not establish when 911Truth.org later lost its recovered prominence, whether that decline was abrupt or gradual, or whether it ever regained sustained top placement after the period Rogers documented.
That is a separate historical question still worth answering.
The distinction matters because Rogers’ 2013 book again emphasizes the disappearance but does not repeat the two-week recovery described in his earlier paper. The omission does not overturn the earlier record; it simply leaves the later ranking history unresolved.
A dataset that reached the 9/11 Memorial Museum
There is one further detail in Rogers’ 2013 book that makes this episode particularly relevant today.
Rogers wrote that the broader project preserving Google results for the query “9/11” attracted interest from the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York City.
That places the dataset in a larger historical context.
The Issue Dramaturg was not merely monitoring one controversial website. It was preserving something normally ephemeral: which sources Google presented to the public as most relevant to September 11 at a particular moment in time.
Search results change.
Unless someone records them, the old order disappears.
Rogers’ team recorded this one.
The larger finding may be more important than the disappearance
The sudden drop understandably drew attention.
But twenty-five years later, another part of the record may be even more revealing.
911Truth.org had spent roughly six months among Google’s first five results for “9/11.”
That fact does not come from our own traffic logs, promotional material or recollection.
It comes from researchers studying search-engine rankings.
Rogers’ larger concern was how search engines create hierarchies of information—determining which sources appear near the top, which remain buried, and therefore which sources users are most likely to encounter.
His 911Truth.org case provided an unusually clear example.
At one moment, a grassroots organization challenging major elements of the established account of September 11 occupied one of the most visible positions available on the web.
Then its visibility changed almost overnight.
Whether the September event resulted from an anti-spam false positive or something else, the episode illustrated something that has only become more consequential since 2007:
A source does not have to disappear from the internet to become difficult to find. It only has to disappear from the results people actually see.
Recovering the history of a movement
The early 9/11 Truth movement existed in a very different information environment.
Independent websites, discussion boards, email lists, blogs, radio programs, DVDs and search engines formed much of the infrastructure through which family members, researchers, journalists, whistleblowers and activists found one another.
911Truth.org became one of those junctions.
The site aggregated research and reporting, followed the 9/11 Commission, promoted conferences and public events, commissioned polling, preserved audiovisual material and connected visitors with work being done across a decentralized movement.
The Google data give that history measurable scale.
911Truth.org was not simply publishing for an already committed audience.
For months in 2007, anyone entering “9/11” into Google could encounter the site among the first handful of results.
That level of visibility was independently observed and preserved.
Conclusion
The surviving record is unusually clear on the central point: 911Truth.org was independently documented among Google’s top five results for “9/11” for roughly six months, and researchers captured its abrupt disappearance from those results in September 2007.
Rogers later documented a short-term return and considered an automated false positive a plausible explanation, but Google’s internal reason for the ranking change remains unknown.
What does not require speculation is the scale of the site’s reach. In 2007, a grassroots 9/11 research organization occupied one of the most visible positions on the early web.
Twenty-five years later, the chart survives.
So does the record behind it.
Preserving the digital record
Recovering this history is part of 911Truth.org’s mission today. Much of the early web has disappeared, links have broken, research projects have gone offline, and records once readily available are increasingly difficult to find.
The work now underway is meant to preserve those materials while their provenance can still be reconstructed—and to make the surviving record accessible through Search the Archive
Read the research
Richard Rogers — 2010 peer-reviewed article
Richard Rogers, “Internet Research: The Question of Method—A Keynote Address from the YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle in the United States Conference,” Journal of Information Technology & Politics, Vol. 7, 2010, pp. 241–260.
This article describes the longer search-results project and reproduces the 911Truth.org chart as Figure 6.
Earlier analysis
Richard Rogers, “The Googlization Question, and the Inculpable Engine,” December 2008.
This version explicitly records 911Truth.org returning to its usual top placement approximately two weeks after the September 2007 disappearance.
Richard Rogers, Digital Methods (MIT Press, 2013)
In his 2013 MIT Press book Digital Methods, Rogers returned to the 911Truth.org case, again describing the site’s top-five placement for “9/11” and its abrupt September 2007 disappearance. He also noted that the broader project preserving Google results for “9/11” drew interest from the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York City.
