Search Engines as Censorship Machines
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer. 
The Google Problem. (It’s so much worse than you think.)
Google is a nasty, nasty company. They’re basically the Facebook of search engines.
They’ve branched out into everything now, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.
The problem with search monopolies that the US government, and others, take advantage of, is that when it’s only really Microsoft and Google that have their own actual Web index, then other engines come along and ask the big ones questions for you.
This is a problem because it’s where all of the censorship and disinformation was coming from, to begin with.
I suppose that probably a fat bunch of nothing good for the users will come from the Google Anti-Trust Trial, which is essentially looking to me like a sham proceeding where the presiding judge, Amit Mehta, has been a thrall of Google’s attorneys and has granted basically everything that Google has asked for.
Judge Mehta has essentially locked what little of the American press remains out of the court proceedings. You can go in, if you can physically attend, but there’s still not a lot to make notes about, because Judge Mehta has allowed Google to seal almost everything important.
Following this, the main “witnesses” are all getting something from Google, in exchange for “friendly” testimony. Apple gets paid a lot of money to make Google the default search on its products, and it’s pretty much Mozilla’s only source of income.
If anyone has any incentive to actually testify against Google, trying to crack open “search choice”, it’s probably going to be Microsoft, which runs another censored search engine full of misinformation and spyware.
So the proceedings are playing out in a rather unfortunate way.
Normally, if the government puts someone on trial and then finds out that at least 2/3rds of the major witnesses have essentially taken enormous bribes to testify to their “good behavior”, and there is the stench of judicial corruption too, then more charges are inbound, and the trial starts over, but not in this case.
People, the users, are being harmed by Google every day in numerous ways, but there is nobody there in court to fight for the user.
The judge is clearly very friendly to the defendant and the witnesses have been tampered with, and some would even say bribed in broad daylight.
(Billions of dollars each to Mozilla and Apple over the years….Would they risk losing this by ruining Google or pissing Google off with their honest testimony?)
It looks very much like Google will just go right on doing what they always do.
They’ve barely bothered to even adjust their behavior with the trial going on in front of them, in fact they’ve stepped on the gas and gone further into the territory of DRM and making sure GAFAM browsers will be the only ones that can access the Web (Widevine, WEI), and interfering with the user’s ad blocker (ManifestV3), and implementing a nasty new tracking system called “Privacy Sandbox”.
“FLoC” got so toxic they just renamed it, but that is what “Privacy Sandbox” is.
This is, of course, on top of making Web browsers enormous and packed with dangerous bloatware. (They’ve even compromised Tor Browser when running in the Safest mode.)
By the way, I tried a ManifestV3 ad blocker the other day.
I might talk more about it in another post, but it was uBlock Origin Lite, and it’s pretty terrible. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure that Raymond Hill has done everything he can possibly do to make use of ManifestV3, but Google has made it all so much worse. In many cases, you can see the elements load and then get hidden, which is not a problem with uBO. It also broke Old Reddit Redirect.
I was evaluating a Japanese Firefox fork called Floorp and decided to try uBO Lite while I was at it, and I went screaming right back to the ManifestV2 version of uBO.
The Biden Administration clearly has no interest in destroying Google, as it’s essentially acting as an arm of the US government and the ironically-named Democratic Party.
(That would be the one accusing everyone else of being Russian sympathizers who act like Putin while they put their political opponents on trial.)
Search for anything that contradicts what this administration says about a lot of issues, Google will just claim that it has no results.
Billions of links per year are censored from their index from DMCA complaints all by themselves. The only “news” sites may as well be spam and State Media.
Everything about this trial is tainted, including the judge, who is a Democrat Obama-appointee, and wears his politics on his sleeve.
(Judge Mehta even ruled against the American people in a consumer protection rule that was going to require prescription drug companies to provide their cash price on television ads.)
Mehta is even such a corrupt “deep state” judge that John Roberts put him on the FISA Court, which is a rubber stamp for when the NSA or other federal agencies are getting information from online service providers (including Microsoft and Google) about their users as part of a massive surveillance dragnet, and also gagging them so it’s illegal to tell the victims.
Being on the FISA court in the first place means he’s “one of them”, one of the ones that will allow the NSA to spy on Americans and call it “incidental intelligence gathering”.
Which is their code term for “Whoops”. But they never delete it when they find out.
Truth be told, they have a “whoops” every second because there’s no punishment for it.
Nothing about this trial seems very legitimate to me. It will not correct the problem that Google is spying on you and helping the government lie to and otherwise brainwash the American public.
It’s getting difficult, really, to even use Google Search at all.
All of this kowtowing to the MAFIAA and the Biden Administration makes it very difficult to find any actual information though the bullshit and noise. It’s spam farms and bullshitting.
There’s this huge, I hate to use the term, but “conspiracy”, to deplatform anyone that big corporations want off the Web.
They’re taking it, and they’ll really use anything that they can get ahold of, including insane people and degenerates. Anyone they can get to make it seem like whatever they do to your platform on the Web is legitimate.
A big reason they’ve turned on Twitter, not that Twitter was ever good, but a big reason is because they’re not calling the shots there. Having any online forum where the “Cancel Karens” can’t just hit a button and remove you from the Web just burns them all alive.
Libera Chat continues to allow itself to be de facto owned and operated by a homophobic “Cancel Karen” who is completely off his rocker.
In a vacuum, the problem is “Well, just don’t use that site/service/whatever.”, but the problem is that we’re running out of Web sites and resources, especially the ones that the likes of Google or Microsoft are going to show you, that are operated by normal mentally healthy (even by the standards of 2005) people.
What they’ve all gone in and done, in some cases, is they’ve manually removed that Web site so that no matter what you do to search for it, it just will not show up.
In one case, the only search engine I was able to have return a Web site that I know exists, was Mojeek and it was only at the bottom of the second page of the results.
There’s nothing illegal on this site, the “Cancel Karens” just don’t like it, yet they won’t shut up about it, so they pique people’s interest and then if you’re determined enough, you’ll find it eventually.
But in 20 years, we’e gone from having search engines take your request and go “Here you go!”, usually on the first 10 results somewhere, to where, they have entire lists, entire lists in America, not the usual Communist Shitholes, where you know, you expect this to happen, but they have lists of billions of pages and tens of thousands of Web sites that you’re not allowed to see no matter what, the search engine has been programmed to not show them to you.
How was this country allowed to get that bad?
So even if this trial for criminal anti-trust against Google does go anywhere, what would we even see it replaced by that’s any better?
I mean, it’s really bad when, and I’m telling you the honest truth here, to find this site, I had to go to Yandex, which is a Russian search engine, and it was at the top of the list.
There’s nothing illegal on this site. People have been trying to get it taken down forever, and making all sorts of lies against it. The guy lives in Florida and hasn’t been arrested for any American crimes, and the site keeps coming back.
The American government can’t take it down. It’s not illegal. So what they do is they have these criminals, like Google and Cloudflare, get together and attack it. And they make it so that you can’t give the site any money, to try to starve it out.
The only way to slip them any money is to use crypto or something. Or use Brave and hand them some BAT tokens.
If you need any convincing that this is not a free country, America is not a free country, wake up. It’s right in front of you.
There are things you’re not allowed to know about which aren’t illegal, which are being illegally suppressed.
This guy hasn’t even committed a single American crime.
In fact, the government sits back and lets criminals go to work vandalizing his site and doxxing the people who use it, and they even exploited a technical problem to try to steal user info to help them send death threats.
Not only is this site not illegal, it’s not even that bad. Where are the police to protect them from the Insane people who are breaking actual laws?
There are no Nazis on the site I am speaking of. They were making fun of the Alt-Right and Scott Adams for crying out loud.
The site has also been massively defamed by people calling themselves “reporters”.
There are just things now that you’re not allowed to say or the mobsters will gang up on you and try to ruin you, and Google is on their side.
But so is Microsoft, so are these “allegedly independent” Brave Search and Mojeek, I mean, you can’t even find this site on dime store engines that are utter crap.
How are they actually independent if they all censor almost the same exact things?
Why should anyone in a free country like America is supposed to be have to go to a Russian search engine that has an English version to get something less ruined than Google?
That’s how bad America is getting for Freedom of Speech.
When you think “There is a regime that says you’re not allowed to search for this, you’re not allowed to know that, we’re watching what you type.” you think “Oh yeah, that f****g Great Chinese Firewall again. When will they be a normal country? When will President Xi let his people live their lives unmolested?”
Nope, wrong. Google, Biden, America. █