Why Google search results cannot be trusted
Anyone who has used Google search engine for finding information on a particular subject or person must have noticed that the search results first show that Wikipedia and mainstream media publish, then some services belonging to Alphabet or other major IT corporations such as YouTube. Even making a search request specific enough and digging into the results deep enough do not guaranty that you may find what alternative media and other more or less objective sources have to say.
The reasons for such biased/incomplete/inaccurate presentation of information by Google are versatile.
Google censorship by way of removal or omission of information from its services or those of its subsidiary companies, such as YouTube, in order to comply with its corporate policies, demands based on courts’ orders or from government agencies of particular states, such as China, France, Germany and Israel, has been public knowledge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google#Israel
In January 2010, for example, it was reported that Google stopped providing automatic suggestions for any search beginning with the term “Islam is”, while it continued to do so for other major religions. https://www.wired.com/2010/01/google-islam-censorship/
Google has adhered to the Internet censorship policies of China, enforced by means of filters called “The Great Firewall of China. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4645596.stm
In January 2006, Google agreed that the China’s version of Google, Google.cn, would filter certain keywords given to it by the Chinese government. http://www.cnn.com/2006/BUSINESS/01/25/google.china/, such as “Tiananmen square 1989”, which did not prevent the latter from blocking Google the same year.
Since August 2018, Google has been working on a version of its search engine for use in China specifically, which would censor content according to the restrictions placed by the Chinese government, named Dragonfly. https://theintercept.com/2018/08/16/google-china-crisis-staff-dragonfly/
Apart from various forms of censorship, Google search serious problems include https://searchengineland.com/google-search-quality-crisis-272174:
- presenting one answer in a special featured snippets box, thus encouraging idle consumption instead of critical evaluation of information;
- offensive search suggestions / autocomplete;
- inaccurate/false/abusive top web results.
In 2014, for example, according to Google Barak Obama was a “King of the United States” https://searchengineland.com/according-google-barack-obama-king-united-states-209733.
In November 2016 Google listed at the top of its “In the news” section that promised the final election counts for the 2016 US presidential election the page didn’t have the final, official, or even accurate counts. https://marketingland.com/google-might-not-able-stop-fake-news-198755
Google search may be manipulated by unscrupulous actors, including professional psy-ops trolls: https://russia-insider.com/en/politics/brig-gen-joel-harding-natos-troll-king-and-neo-nazi-extraordinaire-part-iii/ri16370 and pranksters in many ways, including Google bombing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb and Google bowling.
“Google bombs” are collective efforts to link to a site by a key phrase and artificially elevate a Web site in the Google search results for that search phrase, thus rely heavily on the influence of page rank.
One of the top Google bombs in history was when search for “miserable failure” in September 2006, brought up George W. Bush’s official White House biography as the number one result on Google, Yahoo and MSN, according to the Wikipedia page on Google Bombs. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/02/10-notorious-google-bombs/71731/
Google reportedly tried to curb Google bombs by tweaking their formula for ranking pages by relevancy. The changes limited the ability of relatively small groups to create Google bombs, but it did not end it entirely. https://www.lifewire.com/what-is-a-google-bomb-1616351
The most crucial for the nations that consider themselves democratic, is the ability of Google and other “Big Tech” to shift millions of votes in any direction using about dozen of methods, as revealed by Robert Epstein, https://www.theepochtimes.com/10-ways-big-tech-can-shift-millions-of-votes-in-the-november-elections-without-anyone-knowing_2671195.html, including Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME), Search Suggestion Effect (SSE), Targeted Messaging Effect (TME), Opinion Matching Effect (OME), The Digital Customization Effect (DCE).
Randomized, controlled and peer-reviewed research on SEME showed that when one candidate is favored in search results, that can easily shift the voting preferences of undecided voters from 20 percent to up to 80 percent in some demographic groups. Epstein’s new research on SSE suggests that (a) Google is manipulating opinions from the very first character people type into the Google search bar, and (b) by manipulating search suggestions (those phrases they flash at you while you’re typing your search term), Google can turn a 50/50 split among undecided voters into an astonishing 90/10 split. Those boxes Google often shows you at the top of the results page, the so-called “featured snippets,” also shift votes and opinions, possibly boosting the impact of SEME by between 10 and 30 percent.
With Google this ability to manipulate political perceptions of the users is unparalleled and the corporation obviously actively avails itself of. For example, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, Google employees in January 2017 strategized about how to alter Google search results and other “ephemeral experiences” to counter Trump’s newly imposed travel ban. https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-workers-discussed-tweaking-search-function-to-counter-travel-ban-1537488472
However it is very unlikely that Google Inc. be ever held accountable for such “meddling in American democracy”, given its reportedly deep connections to the “Deep State”.
Two students at Stanford University, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, in 1994 made the first automated web crawling and page ranking application which remains the core component of what eventually became Google’s search service.
Brin and Page had performed their work with funding from the Digital Library Initiative (DLI), a multi-agency program of the National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA and DARPA.
Throughout the development of the search engine, Sergey Brin reported regularly and directly to two people who were not Stanford faculty at all: Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham and Dr. Rick Steinheiser.
Both were representatives of a sensitive US intelligence community research program on information security and data-mining. https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-google-e836451a959e
The primary objective of this grant was “query optimization of very complex queries that are described using the ‘query flocks’ approach.” A second grant — the DARPA-NSF grant most closely associated with Google’s origin — was part of a coordinated effort to build a massive digital library using the internet as its backbone. https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-cia-and-nsa-research-grants-for-mass-surveillance/
In 2010 Eric Schmidt, Google’s former CEO, boasted that Google services’ users do not need to type at all for Google to where they are and have been — the corporation “can more or less guess what you’re thinking about.” https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/dec/20/googles-earth-how-the-tech-giant-is-helping-the-state-spy-on-us
And by manipulating the search results they can try to make you think what they need you think — about individuals, entities, events and the whole nations. Unless you care to use your brain not just for absorbing that they present to you. And/or opt for other search engines.