Filtering Web Search Results

[Stravinsk]

Do you filter your web search results? (Note: $=P, *=a )

After watching a doco on $izz*G*te (which, btw, I did not find on a search engine, but through another medium), I decided to do a net search, using DuckDuckGo (Bing) and just that term, just to see what came up. My gosh, I was staggered at the results I got. For several pages there was almost only opinion pieces on it, all from corporate "opinion makers". Not one independent voice, group etc just what they thought and what it was all about.

When I get this many results all lined up, all by corporate mouthpieces, I tend to get suspicious. One website (huffington $ost) even sited "just look at the google results" as if that was enough to form any kind of opinion on it, when every source was saying it was a loony "conspiracy theory". Although it didn't surprise me too much, because my experience using Youtube (b4 and after Google takeover) showed me that the site admin can skew search results to favor certain opinions on the topic to prominence.

Now, after I used an extension to my browser to block all corporate opinion sites(there was a literal ton of them), I did come across a few bits by independent people, using a different search term.

 

[Lamb]

Google gives great results when I want some craft How Tos or even recipes. But it's really known to filter out the sites that they don't want you to see. The algorithms are against conservatives and even sometimes Christians.

 

[Stravinsk]

Google gives great results when I want some craft How Tos or even recipes. But it's really known to filter out the sites that they don't want you to see. The algorithms are against conservatives and even sometimes Christians.

Having been active on the net since the 90's, I really miss some aspects of what it was back then (at least as far as search engines are concerned). Searching a (controversial) topic didn't present me with a thousand results that all basically said the same thing. Many individuals, just average people, could voice their different views, present evidence etc and the viewer had to dig and consider what they thought about it given the data.

Now it's just an illusion of that. You get a 1000 different websites all parroting the same basic viewpoint. If one can get past page 3..15..20...one might find some independent blogger offering up something the other's don't, but mostly on certain topics it seems more collectivist Newsspeak than anything.

The first doco I watched on the PizzaG... subject was, eh, ordinary. Then I found another that better presented the evidence, including many of the players involved, some of them with certain criminal histories, their associations with each other, and scrubbed webpages. What I am getting from the corporate search results are similar to a lot of TV garbage - personal attacks, straw man arguments, evidence taken out of context, cherry picking information, a heavy dose of argument-from-authority (sometimes as asinine as "just look at google results!") and general/implied warnings of questioning anything (their) consensus (by their measure) determined.

 

[tango]

Even so, it's an improvement on what search engines were like around the turn of the millennium where it seemed whatever search term you typed the first dozen pages or so were endless porn sites.

From what I recall what the porn sites were doing was putting the entire dictionary into their page headers so that whatever words you entered they matched every single one of them.

 

[Lucian Hodoboc]

What is PizzaGate?

 

[Stravinsk]

What is PizzaGate?

According to major corporate web results (page after page after page of them), it's a widely dis-proven conspiracy theory about leaked emails from US government officials and politicians, a secret code substituting food items (like pizza, hot dogs, cheese) for various types of pedophilia connected to a certain pizza place in the US.

In actuality it's just a very small part of a worldwide problem of the very rich and elite people in places of power molesting and murdering children. All you'll get from result's based web searches, however, are corporate talking heads saying it's all made up and purely speculative.