I got an email this morning from Google regarding new Terms of Service that will go into effect next month, May 2024. Here is Paragraph 4 of the new TOS:
- Democracy on the web works.
Google search works because it relies on the millions of individuals posting links on websites to help determine which other sites offer content of value. We assess the importance of every web page using more than 200 signals and a variety of techniques, including our patented PageRank™ algorithm, which analyzes which sites have been “voted” to be the best sources of information by other pages across the web. As the web gets bigger, this approach actually improves, as each new site is another point of information and another vote to be counted. In the same vein, we are active in open source software development, where innovation takes place through the collective effort of many programmers.
So... Google will determine for us what they think is good or bad in terms of web searches and content.... what could POSSIBLY go wrong with that policy?!
To prove the point on how Google manipulate everything, do a simple Google image search. First use the search term, "Black couples", Images then scroll? Now do it again using the search term "White couples" images then scroll. Note the difference?
Why? Well if you control the search results you control the narrative? Back in the day, before all this censorship and control, if you searched say for info on "Climate change" you will get results from all sides of the argument.
If you do it now using "Climate change" you will get millions of results (allegedly) but when you scroll the pages you will find you can only get to around page 45 or so. Even when you click "include results that are duplicated" you will still only get around 45 or so pages, which will equate to around 450, 500 pages yet you were told there were millions of results?
Now when you look, the first few pages will only be from official Gov or UN, EU etc websites, or websites with only one side of the argument.
Google knows that most people won't go behind say page 3 for results, they have been conditioned to usually use the links from the first page.
Control the information you control the narrative!
Sometimes you can beat Google at its own game by using their "before:" tag. So, for instance, you could search on:
climate change before:2000
That is not guaranteed to work but it should help.
I've been saying for quite a while now that Google has gotten stupid. You're right, it used to be a decent search engine, but now it's a propaganda machine and is always trying to SELL you something.
Has anyone tried making a search engine scraper? I know there’s at least one search engine that claims to aggregate from multiple search engines, but that’s not quite what I’m talking about.
Look up common search terms, scrape the results across 20-100 search engines, and compare the results, mapping out unique domains, exclusions, clusters, replicated results, similarities, etc.
Duplicate results across countries.
Would be a nice little data mine.
Would be an interesting little 'rainy weekend' data science project!