UC Davis apparently spent $175,000 to bury the pepper spray incident on Google
The event drew widespread criticism of the school, dragging it into the Occupy Wall Street debate that was making waves around the country.
In the past five years, it appears the University of California at Davis has used a different weapon to cover up that embarrassing incident from search results on Google. Documents obtained by the Sacramento Bee reveal the university paid public relations firms at least \\$175,000 to hide bad publicity on Google when people searched on the university name, and the name of its chancellor, Linda Katehi.
The service, often called reputation management, generally works by flooding the Internet with positive or unrelated blog posts and other Web pages. A a result, the controversial or negative stories move down to the second or third page of Google results.
But spending money on the service led to a different headache for the school. UC Davis is a public school, and that means it's subject to California's Public Records Act transparency laws. The Sacramento Bee said it obtained the documents using this method.
A UC Davis spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request to confirm the Bee's report or comment on it. Of the two firms that worked with UC Davis to improve its Google results, Nevins & Associates declined to comment, and ID Media Partners did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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