Google and the Suppression of Free Thought: An Illustration

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.

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Bollox Ref's picture

so thought I'd try a Yahoo search (first time in years):

TYT.jpg

I don't remember if Yahoo Search now depends on the workings of another engine, but the story comes up right away.

Anyway, aside from Googlemaps and Googlebooks (a treasure trove of historic books for download), I make a point of avoiding the search engine/Chrome and use DuckDuckGo or Ixquick.

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Gëzuar!!
from a reasonably stable genius.

divineorder's picture

several years so as not to feed the other beast.

Guess I sill try some of the others you list.

Thanks

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A truth of the nuclear age/climate change: we can no longer have endless war and survive on this planet. Oh sh*t.

@divineorder no question. I avoid google, chrome and yahoo for their site clicking harvesters. duckduckgo works pretty good, but it still has the algorithms to get "top sites" posted at top. requires a bit of excavation beneath the low hanging fruit (terrible mixed metaphor), to get good info.

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Meteor Man's picture

I left a comment at another diary about clicking the Antifa Are Terrorists link and getting Google Play.

I just tried again and got the article that claimed a series of examples where Antifa showed up armed with weapons:

“These antifa guys were showing up with weapons, shields and bike helmets and just beating the shit out of people. … They’re using Molotov cocktails, they’re starting fires, they’re throwing bombs and smashing windows.”

http://thefreethoughtproject.com/antifa-classified-terrorist-violence/

The story claimed Politico as a source. Looks very fishy to me.

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"They'll say we're disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war." Howard Zinn

maggid's picture

@Meteor Man Actually, the story is reposted without commentary from Zerohedge. It looks like more like the rightwing police state twaddle I would expect from ZH. I don't know what Free Thought's agenda is in posting this. It's not in character. Again-- follow the money. Maybe they get paid to insert crap like this. It would be good to know.

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The marriage between capitalism and democracy is over. –Slavoj Zizek

Meteor Man's picture

@maggid
I was wondering why nobody else had the story. An odd turnabout for an anti-cop site. At one time they were very reliable on police brutality cases.

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"They'll say we're disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war." Howard Zinn

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@Meteor Man In the Age of Obama, some right-wing sites have veered anti-establishment. Part of that is because of racism (a Black guy became president), and part is that they've finally figured out that corporatism isn't their friend, and neither is every rich white guy, just because he's rich and white. It's pretty irritating that it took most of them till 2010 to figure out this is a police state and we're being royally screwed by liars. If they'd been willing to take that position in the late 80s, we wouldn't be here. It's also irritating that for some of them it required seeing a Black man wielding that power for it to be wrong, just as it's irritating that for some people, seeing a Black man wielding that power made it all right.

It was easy in the Bush era. Right-wing people were lining up behind someone who was not only right-wing, but also a corporatist, a warmonger, an authoritarian, a liar, arguably a murderer (drone assassinations?), and, of course, a racist. Democrats and left-wing people were lining up against him, and, by extension, all those things.

Under Obama, Democrats and some left-wing people decided it was OK to support a corporatist, a warmonger, an authoritarian, arguably a murderer, because he wasn't a racist and he was Black. (Although the last good thing he did on race that I know about was his speech on racism when he was campaigning in 2008.) To my mind, this marks the final split between the Democratic party and the left, but it's complicated by the fact that part of the left apparently picks sides based pretty much exclusively on skin color (except that they won't side with a Republican, even if he's Black).

What all this has to do with your comment is that in this age, sometimes right-wing sites will publish true things. Zerohedge is not one of my go-to sites, but I have cited articles from there. They will publish true things because some of their enemies (the Clintons, for instance) are actually doing rotten things, and they're willing to tell those truths.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

dervish's picture

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal that they promulgate, and likewise there are people on both the left and right who see through this BS, and are willing to point out the truth. I'll take the truth where ever I can find it.

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"Obama promised transparency, but Assange is the one who brought it."

Here is my working theory about using Bing:

Microsoft has already gotten its 'public whipping' in court. Later, Microsoft created Bing. Therefore, the eyes watching Microsoft, (now behaving better), became the same eyes watching Bing.

Besides, Bing does a pretty good job in general. (And when you search the term, "Horoscope", Bing gives you a top-level result that looks cool - usually.)

best, john

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Strange that a harp of thousand strings should keep in tune so long

that brings suppressed results to the top.

Youtube has gotten really bad too. Not a day goes by when I don't get an "unavailable" notice. I've been looking into false flag stuff lately, so that's obviously a target.

The superior sneer TPTB have for we mere mortals is ever more evident. It used to be that we were thought able to think for ourselves. I guess that's before they diluted education and started fear-mongering and divisiveness for profit.

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Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@gustogirl A fairly large number of us think for ourselves.

Remember, there's more independents in this country than belong to either party--and both parties together only outnumber us 55% to 43%. Twelve points is a lot, but not when you're dealing with a political cartel, and the only other alternative is living in political no-man's-land with no voice.

Indicators are that our numbers are growing and theirs are shrinking.

The Russia story is also a pretty good indicator. About half the country was willing to fall for it--maybe a little less than half. 70% of the country supported the Iraq War.

There's a lot of us, I think; we just don't know how to find each other.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

lotlizard's picture

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I've found much useful advice. I feel like I've been wrestling with
google to try and get the responses I'm looking for.

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Betty Clermont

From a search I was doing Friday, keywords "Feinstein Headwaters Forest", because I am constantly having to remind myself why I ever voted for her. The other Her:
feinsteinlol.jpg

That made me LMAO so I took a screenshot for posterity, that's all I got. Posterity.

"Get Her in Two Days!" So Prime, what is next? "Lower Prices on Bernie Sanders!" lol

Thanks for this essay maggid, keep going.

peace

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Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@eyo Oh my God. Please. Can I send it back?

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal Apparently she is No Return, although the Deposit parts still work. That's an old reference to bottles used to be stamped 'No Deposit/No Return' for the youngsters out there.

The other day I sorted through some emergency rations, after taste-testing I threw half away. I wouldn't eat that stuff even if starving, no way. More symbolism for the California D Party. It really needs to purge out the old corporate Ds, and ...? I don't know, but don't just give me a good looking package with poisonous contents, overnight by drone. Please! It does not sustain me.

Thanks for the laughs.

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TheOtherMaven's picture

@eyo
Doesn't matter what you enter as a search term, they have an algorithm that picks it up and plugs it into their preview function. If you're sucker enough to click on that choice, you will probably find it's selling cheap rubbish.

There are a couple of them posing as genealogical research sites (which is how I found out about this), but they're only come-ons for worthless "your family name here" kitsch.

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There is no justice. There can be no peace.

@TheOtherMaven it says AD right there in my face, how else am I supposed to take it? It is a Paid Advertisement that seems to have been placed there by a Stupid Robot, but that's another subect. Or is it?

good luck

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mhagle's picture

I use ecosia.org. They claim to plant trees with their revenue.

Recently compared their search to a google search. Trying to find information about the chemical plant explosions and other flooding info. The ecosia search yielded many more results.

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Marilyn

"Make dirt, not war." eyo

divineorder's picture

@mhagle

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A truth of the nuclear age/climate change: we can no longer have endless war and survive on this planet. Oh sh*t.

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

but when I got there, the question was "Do you want to add DuckDuckGo to Chrome?" Does this mean I'll be dealing with Google no matter what, and just won't be using it as a search engine?

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal
with Norton. I don't want anything that won't be checked for virus.

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"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal @Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal there is an 'open source' version called chromium that GOOG makes too, it is what I use for online banking sometimes. I still use Firefox mostly, since version 0.99. heh Everyone knows Google paid Mozilla Foundation for a long time too, right? Oligarchs suck, and so do their politicians.

https://www.chromium.org/

good luck

Edit: because of course. I missed this: Mozilla Joins George Soros’s Efforts In Launching A Strike Against “Fake News”

Mozilla, the non-profit organization which runs the Firefox internet browser, said Wednesday it was launching an effort against “fake news,” as fact-checking software backed by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and George Soros got its first run-out in public to shape our Orwellian nightmare of future truth arbiters.

Mozilla said it was “investing in people, programs and projects” in a new initiative to “disrupt misinformation online” calling for a “Mozilla Information Trust Initiative,” or MITI for short, Business Insider reported.

They further stated the “internet’s ability to power democratic society suffers greatly” because of fabricated stories, such as the “Pope endorsing Donald Trump for the U.S. presidency” or a “dead FBI agent killed in a mysterious fire with information on former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton” – just two examples of stories that turned out to be bogus.

okie dokie

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@eyo

Well, damn... I certainly hadn't known that Google had been investing in FF, although they do seem to be throwing their money everywhere but at me. Maybe I can get back-pay from Putin for all the times that I was forced to use him as a favorable comparative to the US Psychopaths That Be and their political lackeys, what with him being sane and all?

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Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.

A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.

divineorder's picture

@Ellen North forget to throw some at JtC for the site ! Smile

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A truth of the nuclear age/climate change: we can no longer have endless war and survive on this planet. Oh sh*t.

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@eyo Ugh, gross, Mozilla!

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

enhydra lutris's picture

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal
engine. What Duckduckgo is asking is whether you want to add it to the selectable search engines within chrome so that you can make it the default. It isn't a browser, so it still operates within whatever browser you use.

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

Lookout's picture

with no problem. You don't have to google chrome. Does anyone use the Tor browser? That is supposedly the best for not tracking you.

Someone upthread said Norton wouldn't let you use Duckduckgo. I use AVG. They have a free version. There is also Avast which is free (but made by our old buddy Mr/Ms Google)
Now a days Total AV is being recommended
https://www.antivirusbest10.com/free-antivirus-software

And thanks for the ecosia.org link Marilyn. I look forward to trying it out.

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

Benny's picture

Last night, I was viewing articles and YT's about New America Foundation's break with Open Markets think tank last week. Open Markets studies monopolistic practices and impacts on democracy. (Open Markets is allegedly nonpartisan, but I don't buy that.) New America is part of the Clinton's neoliberal camp, and of course, it has the financial support of Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. However, when Open Markets's director, Barry Lynn, was fired last week over Lynn's praise of Alphabet (parent company) being fined by the EU for its data gathering in its monopolistic practices, Anne Marie Slaughter fired Lynn, likely because their big donor, Google, told Slaughter to dismiss him or they would withdraw their financial support.

Matt Stoller (formerly of Open Left, MyDD-- long time bloggers likely remember him) of Open Markets, now called Citizens Against Monopolies, was on Tucker Carlson's show on Friday night to discuss this fissure. Shortly after the interview, Stoller tweeted the interview link. I had used Chrome to pull up the twitter platform and Stoller's tweets. While watching the interview, it stopped about halfway through. Now, it's possible that my internet connection was loose-goosey, but I noticed many of the tweets Stoller posted, the text and images weren't appearing after refreshing the browser. It was when I switched to Mozilla that I could continue viewing the interview and view the full suite of Stoller's tweets.

Here's the interview, short, but Stoller gets his points across.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7KiGxZlmeE width:200 height:200]

Someone at Gizmodo also published a piece about Google's practices with other publishers, such as Forbes.

Josh Marshall shared his business practices with Google at TPMemo.

Let’s discuss the various ways we’re in business with Google.

Then there’s AdExchange. That’s the part of Google that buys ad inventory. A huge amount of our ads come through ad networks. AdExchange is far and away the largest of those for us – often accounting for around 15% of total revenues every month – sometimes higher. So our largest single source of ad revenue is usually Google. To be clear that’s not Google advertising itself but advertisers purchasing our ad space through Google. But every other ad we ever run runs over Google’s ad serving system too. So Google software/service (DFP) runs the ad ecosystem on TPM. And the main buyer within that ecosystem is another Google service (Adexchange).

Then there’s Google Analytics. That’s the benchmark audience and traffic data service. How many unique visitors do we have? How many page views do we serve each month? What’s the geographical distribution of our audience? That is all collected through Google Analytics. Now, that’s not our only source of audience data. We have several services we use for that in addition to our own internal systems. But we do use it for the big aggregate numbers and longterm record keeping. In many ways it’s the canonical data people on the outside look at to see how big our audience is. Do we have to share that data? No. Unless we want potential advertisers to see we have an audience.

Next there’s search. Heard of that? There’s general search and then there’s Google News, a separate bucket of search. Search tends not to be that important for us in part because we’ve never prioritized it and in part because as a site focused on iterative news coverage what we produce tends to be highly ephemeral – at least in search terms. We don’t publish a lot of evergreen stories. Still, search is important. For other publishers it’s the whole game.

So let’s go down the list: 1) The system for running ads, 2) the top purchaser of ads, 3) the most pervasive audience data service, 4) all search, 5) our email.

But wait, there’s more! Google also owns Chrome, the most used browser for visiting TPM. Chrome is responsible for 41% of our page views. Safari comes in second at 36%. But the Safari number is heavily driven by people using iOS devices. On desktop Chrome is overwhelmingly dominant.

You can read the rest of Marshall's post here.

So, it made wonder how Google's practices will affect places like C99, TPW, and JPR. Not concerned about TOP because they sold out a long time ago.

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One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will. To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.--Tennyson

maggid's picture

@Benny Thanks for posting this. I had seen the TPM article, but decided not to include it in my post; didn't want to range too far. Sunshine is a great disinfectant here. The more the public knows of Google's manouverings, the less effective they will be. The other point is that this is exactly what's at stake in the attacks against Net Neutrality. We can still find ways around Google's attempts to influence what we see to what will help their bottom line. Without Net Neutrality, we will find ourselves constricted by a softer version of the Great Firewall of China.

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The marriage between capitalism and democracy is over. –Slavoj Zizek