Google This
The term “google” has become synonymous with searching for information online, but over the past several years the search engine Google has been accused of engaging in numerous censorship practices. According to Epstein, these include the banning of words and phrases from autocomplete, blacking out or blurring properties on Google Maps, removing videos on YouTube, shutting people out of their accounts for violating terms of agreement, restricting news sources, banning businesses from AdWords, removing websites or lowering them in search engine results, and placing websites on a quarantine list (for the record, I found most of the links for this post using… Google). Google has further been accused of favoring big business in search results, biasing search results on moral grounds, and influencing elections. Recently forty states filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google for structuring its search results using a method that “often requires companies to purchase ads to rise to the top of users’ search results.” During the COVID-19 crisis, Google censored information in the name of public health, raising additional questions about the search engine’s proper authority, connection to government, and ownership of its users’ information.
Advanced search techniques are the most effective method of getting around some of these alleged hurdles, but if a website is banned altogether refined techniques aren’t going to help. Since Google is the world's largest search engine, however, it’s hard to ignore as a source of information.
As far as performing random searches in my personal time, I don’t turn to Google for much anymore outside of checking the weather or searching for the location of a business, mainly because Google delivers results that are boring. I miss the days when interesting and surprising links would pop up more frequently, including WordPress blogs and personal webpages. Now I mostly retrieve mainstream articles that are about as exciting as a copy of Reader’s Digest. In addition to some of the business practices already covered, this may also be due to Google’s ranking methods and the decline of blogging in general (until Substack, that is). Also, I have no idea what data Google is collecting when I use it.
I had switched to DuckDuckGo for enhanced privacy if not more exciting search results, but abandoned that search engine as a matter of principle when they started censoring content. For the moment I am using Brave for its stances on privacy and censorship, if not for its effectiveness as a search engine, which I haven’t fully evaluated yet.
Image: Google web search.png / Wikimedia Commons
I have experienced this, too. I know there are articles on a topic and then both G. and DDG give poor results-- Or structured results. And I have not seen any articles that address this shift. Our users may not realize this..or even remember that it was once otherwise. Excellent topic that needs exploration and--if I get time--some examples. Or perhaps others here have examples.
I've been using Brave and DDG as my primary search engines for personal use for quite some time though I don't think they are any better at search then Google. In some cases, they are worse, but the privacy trade-offs count here. One thing that I had never considered was using boredom as a criteria, but you're absolutely right, Google results are boring. Content farms are so good at SEO that the algorithm and it's stewards can't compete.