For most of us, search engines are the primary tools that we use to find information on the Internet.
When they originally came on the scene, search engines could generally be trusted to present information in a neutral manner. The most relevant information was supposed to come up first, and less relevant information was supposed to be pushed farther down the listings.
Of course bias eventually started to creep in, and that was extremely unfortunate. Certain sources of information were purposely elevated while other disfavored sources of information were purposely suppressed.
But what if I was to tell you that we have now gotten to a point where the vast majority of the information on any particular topic is being purposely excluded altogether?
I know that this may sound crazy, and so I am going to take some time and prove it to you.
Google is the most prominent search engine in the world, and so let’s start there. Go to Google and do a search for “Donald Trump” and look at the top of the page to see how many “results” you get.
I just did that, and it says that there are about 451,000,000 results.
That should be plenty of information, because nobody would ever have the time to go through 451,000,000 results.
But the truth is that the search engine doesn’t actually give us that many results.
Scroll down and go to page 2. For me, it still says that there are about 451,000,000 results.
Most people would stop there, and the big search engines know this.
But I want you to try something. Just keep going to the next page for as long as you can.
For me, everything looks the same until I get to page 12. At the top of the page, it says “Page 12 of about 118 results”.
Wow.
Needless to say, 118 results is a far smaller number than 451,000,000, and the vast majority of the 118 results that I have been given come from corporate media sources that generally have similar opinions of Trump.
At the bottom of page 12, there is a message that will seemingly allow me to pull up the rest of the 451,000,000 results. This is what it says…
In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 118 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.
That sounded good to me, and so I clicked on the link.
But it didn’t give me 451,000,000 results.
Instead, I can now click through 40 pages of results that mostly come from corporate media sources and that’s it.
The top of page 40 says “Page 40 of about 398 results”, and there is absolutely no option to go farther.
Do you understand what this means?
All but 398 of the 451,000,000 potential results have been purposely excluded.
You may be tempted to believe that this is just because Donald Trump is such a controversial figure.
So let’s try an example that is completely and utterly uncontroversial.
Let’s try putting the term “quilting” into Google.
I just did that, and the top of page 1 tells me that there are about 228,000,000 results.
And it keeps telling me that there are about 228,000,000 results until I get to page 26.
Once I get to page 26, the top of the page tells me that there are only 258 results.
But once again I am given the option of repeating the search with the omitted results included by clicking a link at the bottom of the page.
I just did that, and now I have been given 42 pages of results.
At the top of page 42, it tells me that there are only 414 results and it will not allow me to go any farther.
No matter what you search for, the pattern will always be the same.
You will only be given hundreds of results, and those results will generally be from certain types of sources.
Bing is the second largest search engine, and they do things a little differently.
If you do a search for “Donald Trump” on Bing, it will tell you that there are 194,000,000 results.
But for me, once I got to page 14 I noticed that they started to give me the same results on each page over and over again.
For dozens of pages, it was just the same results.
Do they really think that people wouldn’t notice?
Try it for yourself. Go to Bing and type in “Donald Trump” and just keep scrolling through the pages and you will notice this very odd pattern.
So at this point, the largest search engines are purposely restricting the amount of information that they give us.
And the vast majority of the listings that they do come up with are generally from certain types of sources that they wish to promote.
Yes, it is still possible to find truly independent sources of information, but it is becoming much more difficult to do so.
For example, once this article has been discovered by the search engines you will be able to find it if you type in the exact title.
But the vast majority of people just type in a single word or a short phrase when they are searching for something online, and those searches are going to be overwhelmingly dominated by certain types of sources.
In other words, the big tech companies have essentially put you and me in a box at this point.
We are going to be repeatedly fed information that they want us to consume.
As for everything else, what we are not allowed to find may as well not even exist.
Facebook, Twitter and the other big social media platforms do the same thing. They promote the things they want you to see, and they suppress information that they want you to avoid.
The information that they are keeping from us is still out there, but at this point the tech giants have pretty much been successful in essentially deleting most of the Internet for the vast majority of the population.
The inspiration for this article was a great YouTube video that was produced by a guy named Jimmy Corsetti. I would encourage you to share his video with everyone that you can, because he does a great job of breaking all of this down.
I still believe that search engines and social media platforms could be such helpful tools if they would just present information to us in a neutral way.
My hope is that many people that work in the tech industry will read this and that it will inspire them to push for reform.
Trying to greatly restrict the amount of information that we have access to is fundamentally wrong.
A vibrant “marketplace of ideas” is essential for any free society, and right now our “marketplace of ideas” is dying right in front of our eyes.
***It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***
