I have no way to tell if this was deliberate or not, but personally I lost any respect and trust in Google the day they removed the discussion search filter. Before that day I could find common people talking about a product or a political issue, now unless I'm prepared to jump dozens of pages I'm inundated by sites selling that product or affiliated with that political orientation.
This has been fairly thoroughly debunked:<p><a href="https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/0YippLN0KoA;context-place=topicsearchin/webmasters/category$3Achit-chat%7Csort:relevance%7Cspell:false" rel="nofollow">https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/0Y...</a>
>The WSWS has been blacklisted in searches dealing with history, and in particular historical topics related to the revolutionary struggles of the 20th century. These include the terms “Russian revolution,” “Bolshevik revolution” and “October revolution,” all of which returned results in the top 50 in April<p>That's probably ... correct.
> The physical censorship implemented by Google is so extensive that of the top 150 search terms that, as late as April 2017, connected the WSWS with readers, 145 no longer do so.<p>> These findings make clear that the decline in Google search traffic to the WSWS is not the result of some technical issue, but a deliberate policy of censorship.<p>...or that they have not been keeping up with their SEO, are getting edged out by AMP sites, tripped over some other google rule, etc...
> These findings make clear that the decline in Google search traffic to the WSWS is not the result of some technical issue, but a deliberate policy of censorship.<p>Quite a claim.
This is why <a href="http://levelnews.org" rel="nofollow">http://levelnews.org</a> was created. It is a place to find real-time independent, progressive public-interest news.<p>If you would like to know more about the project, the blog is here: <a href="http://blog.levelnews.org" rel="nofollow">http://blog.levelnews.org</a><p>Much of the codebase is open source and can be found on GitHub if you'd like to contribute: <a href="https://github.com/levelnewsorg" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/levelnewsorg</a>
Google adjusts its search results all the time for business reasons but also for political or legal reasons. The PC description is "tuning the search algorithm". That may encompass any number of effects to the search results or Google interfaces. While I hate the idea of regulation, Google Search is such a basic utility in the US that it really should be regulated by the government.<p>Regulation is done on utilities like cell providers, cable/internet providers and consumers are usually aware of multiple choices. If I ask a non-tech user to name a search engine other than Google, they likely can't. So users do their search and interact with the results they are presented.<p>Edit: Removed my personal experience. Added thoughts on regulation.
I'm an anti-censorship extremist, but this doesn't feel to me like censorship. After all, the site is being discussed here on HN, and I'm sure it could also be found through many other search engines, portals, or whatever.<p>Even if we get to the point that certain pages are only likely to be found via 10-20 year old technologies, so what? Those technologies were invented for text articles and still work well for them, and text articles are what matter most. Similar things are also true about the runners-up in "matter most", which in some order are straightforward image, sound and video files.
When Google, Facebook, and others announced that they were banning "fake news", many on the left cheered.<p>But it was probably naive to assume Google would limit itself to censoring political opinions with which one disagrees.
Meh, I have a hard time caring about this because I want Google to block propaganda and misinformation. From my experience, socialist websites and forums tend to ignore, rewrite, or white wash the history of communism in Russia/USSR, Venezuela, and even North Korea. So much so that the No True Scotsman fallacy should just be the No True Socialist fallacy. Go check out /r/socialism if you want your head to spin. According to that sub, there were no famines in the USSR, Stalin never killed anyone, and everything bad we hear about Venezuela is just media bias. And then when it's objectively true and can't be dodged, they aren't really socialists.
Gee, wouldn't it be great if we could just look up the open-source code for the most popular search engine on the "open" Internet?<p>Given the amount of power and money they now have, effectively having "won the game," it seems ethical to me to open-source their entire search algorithm.
I wonder if it'd be possible... (i know it'd be extremely challenging) - to have some sort of open-source-ai search engine that runs on the blockchain... -- something that anyone could use the API to make a frontend interface ala google, but all the rankings/etc... are controlled by the blockchain, and people using the sites could maybe thumbs up/down if it was a good search and then the AI could use those indicators to hone it's algorithms.
EDIT: I've noticed all the replies and I'd like to acknowledge them. Unfortunately I feel very stupid for not screenshotting what I saw when I searched one hour ago. I now see 62,900 results, and I can load up to page 6. I can't prove that I was not able to load page 2 before, but it's true.<p>My original comment remains unedited below.<p>--<p>For a concrete demonstration of pathological de-ranking, do a query for "site:web.archive.org".<p>I get "59,000 results" on page 1, but page 2 will never load!<p>There <i>are</i> a few results, which proves that a) web.archive.org are not using robots.txt or other blocking techniques, and b) that Google's infrastructure is inhaling content. But it's invisible.<p>Think about how sad this is - once a site goes dead, it's offline, <i>even though the content is still publicly accessible.</i> If only that context was indexed using a decent search engine.<p>Practically speaking, I totally acknowledge that archived content is complex to surface; sites can be pulled offline because content needs to be disappeared for any number of reasons, etc. I recognize the general difficulty of getting this right. So I'm <i>not</i> _really_ arguing "if only this were surfaced", because it's unfair to - I'm more saying "hey look, this is what it looks like when something has been completely killed," as a demonstrable and extreme datapoint.