What is up with google lately?

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Everything I now try to do research on google only shows me results for left-leaning news articles that spout hate for the US.

I mean seriously. I can look up anything related to wicca and I get endless search results about "racism in witchcraft".

Or I can try to look up the history of China's relations with foreigners starting with Portuguese merchants whom they eventually drove out of their country with violence and instead i get results about America's violent and oppressive history towards Chinese immigrants (which, um, had NOTHING to do with what I was trying to look up people)

I think Google has pretty much beome a propaganda machine for left-wingers or progressives who have an ax to grind with America the same way FOX News has become the propaganda machine for right-wingers.

I wonder if there's any search engine more reliable than Google? It's not even the fact that I get bombarded with political s**t every time I search something, it's the fact that I can rarely find what I'm actually looking for anymore these days.

Hmmm. My experience is different.

I just now Googled "Wicca" and got the following:

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Wicca
https://www.brandeis.edu/now/2021/septe ... ation.html
https://www.defenseculture.mil/Portals/ ... 142221-557
https://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religion ... icca.shtml
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/arti ... itchcraft/
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wicca

No political diatribes so far.

One problem with Google search these days is that it tries to personalize results, based on what Google's artificial intelligence thinks you want to see. So I would guess that Google's AI has somehow gotten the idea that you, personally, WANT to see diatribes about racism in witchcraft.

I would suggest that you try accessing Google from a different device and see if that helps.

Last edited by Mona Pereth on 20 Sep 2022, 8:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Unfortunately i have no other device i can access from besides my smartphone...

Either way I'd say google is really stupid now. Just like Facebook.

Do you have another web browser on your phone? Perhaps try that, too. Also, if you have a Google account that you are typically logged into in one browser, don't log into it in the second browser.

I guess that's worth a shot.

You've noticed it, too. I've been getting such news as well and I'm tired of it. I'm right-leaning and I'd like to see news from all angles and not just from the Woke left.

Browse with Duck Duck Go. I often do.

Google is my browser of last resort . But never confident in it results .

I thought about switching to Duck Duck Go. I know they say they protect the browser's privacy which turned out to not be true according to the news, but it's not like anywhere on the internet is safe from me being spied on so why not?

Plus as long as I'm not being bombarded by any political agenda and I have the option to research all the facts I think that's still a plus.

I remember people talking about anecdotes like two different people Googling 'Egypt' and getting completely customized results that yes, were about Egypt, but quite a bit different in their content, so they've been doing their part to cleave people off into their own reality tunnels for the sake of 'engagement'.

Some people have recommended DuckDuckGo, Brave, etc., yes - try some of those and see if one hits your preferences.

If you ever want to see more on the topics above there's a handful of people I like listening to - eg. Daniel Schmachtenberger, Tristan Harris (Center for Humane Technology - also the narrator / key contributor to 'The Social Dilemma'), The Stoa w/ Peter Limburg when the topic of information bubbles comes up, there's a pretty steady conversation about the problems of advertising money driving platforms to aim for engagement, engagement coming from dopamine satiation over truth, thus the end result is that the most financially lucrative model with that incentive structure is one that breaks democracy.

It would seem very strange that a bunch of overpaid money-grabbers such as Google would deliberately promote left-wing ideas. Maybe they've lost control of their own software? OTOH, political bias depends to a degree on the beholder's political beliefs. To the hard left, most political statements are fascist drivel, while to the far right, the same material is mostly leftist crap.

I'd try it myself to see what I get, but I never use the Google search engine because I don't like being tracked. Try a better search engine.