We have all heard recently about how Google has instituted policies, allegedly to counter "fake news", suppressing results of various non-mainstream website in their search results. This has resulted in significantly less traffic and therefore less revenue for many sites which we in our community look to for news sources. So, when I had a bit of free time the other day, I set out to do an experiment, to test this hypothesis and observe Google's search results censoring in action.

First of all, we all have alternatives to using Google to search. I strongly suggest you acquaint yourselves with them, save them on your computer, and where possible, use one of them as your default search engine. Here are the links to several:

Yippy

Yandex

Bing

DuckDuckGo

Ixquick

The Internet Archive

Dogpile

Unbubble.eu

I am not going to get into the relatives strengths and weaknesses of each of these. That is for another article. I have used these search engines and have found each of them to be useful at least some of the time, bringing me to results I would not have found otherwise.

Test case:

During the elections, we all remember that Cenk Uygur of the Young Turks, was up to a point very passionately pro-Bernie and willing to criticize Herself. At some point, and I forget right now whether it was towards the end of the primary or around the D Party convention, he started to get all weird and oddly equivocating noises about Her Royal Candidacy started coming out of his mouth. As we have to be continually reminded-- follow the money. It was reported recently that pro-Clinton money people had funneled $20 million into the TYT news operation. Well, that explains what we had witnessed. In general, I am coming to the conclusion that when a public figure stops being critical towards someone whom by virtue of their historical standpoints or their general worldview should condemn, there is either money involved or precarious job security.

Et tu, Cenk?

“News is red hot right now and being positioned on the progressive side of the coin has put us in a very good place,” Uygur said, according to Bloomberg.

Now, somewhere in my websurfing, I found this original article at the Free Thought Project covering this news. I suggest you have a look, it is a good illustration of what real journalism is up against in the face of the obscene sums of money the owning class has at their disposal to buy media. My point is not the corruption of TYT as a progressive voice. This is about how Google influences search results.

My test:

Using the search terms "Young Turks" Clinton, I conducted a search on several of the search engines above, interested to see what rank the Free Though Project (FTP) article had in their searches. Here are the results for the search engines which returned an extensive list of results:

Yippy: 3
Yandex: 15
Duckduckgo: 5
Dogpile: 3
Ixquick: 5
Bing: 7

Clearly, this was an important enough article to show up high on all these search engines' results. The average rank for these 6 search engines was 6.3. In 5 of the 6, the article showed up in the top 10 results.

So, what about Google?

Then (drumroll) I tried the same search on Google. I had been prepared to look down to 60 or 80 search results if Google was pushing down FTP's articles as a "fake news source". But no: I scrolled through Googles complete list of over 800 returned results and the FTP article was complete absent. Suppressed. As a second test, I tried adding specific identifiers to the Google search, which I knew because I already had found the article, such as the author's name, Jay Syrmopoulos, or a text string from the article, such as "news is red hot", Google immediately placed the FTP article at the top of my search results.

In other words, Google's suppression of certain websites from their search results isn't absolute; it is subtle. If you are a patient and thoughtful researcher,even using only Google, by entering different search terms, Google might eventually give you what you are looking for. So who is the reader who will turned aside by Google's suppression of non-MSM sources?

First of all, someone who doesn't realize what Google is up to. I may be preaching to the choir here, but Google's control of our internet experience is (still) relatively limited. The good news is that none of the other search engines appear to be engaging in this sort of search result distortion (or if they do, is with different agendas). Just don't use Google to search. As a matter of fact, let's stop using Google as a verb and start saying "search the web". Not all tissue is Kleenex, I use both to wipe my nose and then throw it away, which is what we should do with Google.

Secondly, someone who only has a vague idea what they are looking for, or who is doing open-ended research, is likely to be steered away from Google-disapproved sources without being aware of it. What to do? Use all your means of communicating to those who are listening to you and tell them what Google is up to and encourage them to use other means to search the internet.

Now, I have a proposed project for someone who is good at programming websites, which I am not: We could shine a very clear light on Google's practices here, by creating a search engine website that compared the ranking of various search results on Google with other websites. and ranked the results in order of how deeply they were suppressed by Google. In other words, at the top of the search would be results that, like the FTP article, were completely suppressed by Google, followed by results that were pushed down 100 results compared to the other websites, then those pushed down 50, and so on. I don't know how to program this, but I'm sure it could be done, and it would be a fantastic tool to give the progressive websites harmed by Google some extra attention and better shine a light on their practices.

I would be interested to hear what your experiences are, and what your own research turned up when comparing search results form different sources.