This article notes how Google manipulates its searches to favor its own products and partners, but it doesn’t touch on Google’s even more insidious practice of manipulating its searches to favor its own ideological biases, which are, of course, hard-Left. Last year, Google changed its searches on Islamic topics to push Islamic proselytizing and propaganda. For years, Jihad Watch was the first result that came up when one searched for “jihad” on Google; that was when Google search results were based on subject congruence and popularity of the site. But now, when one searches for “jihad” on Google, the first few pages are full of Islamic apologetic nonsense about how Islam is a religion of peace; Jihad Watch doesn’t show up until around page six.
That is just one example. Google now manipulates its searches on a massive scale, to deep-six those who tell the truth about Islam and jihad, and to favor the hard-Left line across the board. The U.S. needs to follow India’s example in this, and pursue anti-trust legislation to break up Google and the other social media giants, which now have control over the means of communication that totalitarian states only dreamed of.
“Google told to pay Rs 135.86 crore fine for abusing its power in India,” Economic Times, February 9, 2018 (thanks to Lookmann):
NEW DELHI|MUMBAI: The Competition Commission of India (CCI) has imposed a ?136-crore fine on Google for “search bias” and abusing its “dominant position”.
The Indian competition regulator’s ruling comes after similar setbacks in the European Union and Russia for the world’s most popular search engine.
In a 190-page order, the Competition Commission of India (CCI) said Google abused its dominant position on three counts that largely relate to search, while no foul play was seen in case of advertising. CCI imposed a penalty amounting to 5% of the average revenue generated from India over the three years to FY15, an amount of ?135.85 crore, which has to be deposited within 60 days. A maximum penalty of 10% can be imposed under the Act.
“Google was found to be indulging in practices of search bias and by doing so, it causes harm to its competitors as well as to users,” the order said. “Google was leveraging its dominance in the market for online general web search, to strengthen its position in the market for online syndicate search services,” the CCI said. The ruling follows complaints filed by Matrimony.com and Consumer Unity & Trust Society (CUTS) in 2012 against Google LLC, Google India Pvt Ltd and Google Ireland Ltd.
Key Complaint Alleges Discrimination
The key complaint against Google is that it operates search and its advertising services AdWords in a discriminatory manner, causing harm to advertisers and indirectly to consumers.Further, it was alleged to be creating an uneven playing field by favouring Google’s own services and partners, through manually manipulating its search results to the advantage of its vertical partners….
Last year in a similar case the European Union’s anti-trust arm fined Google $2.7 billion for promoting its own products over others in what should have been a “universal” search. Google also settled an anti-trust matter in Russia out of court….
mortimer says
The inherent biases and distortions of facts in favor of the highest bidder is not only reprehensible and immoral, but it may be found to be criminal.
I think freedom-loving people should put their money where their mouth is and support a new search engine that is not google. I have started to use Duck-Duck-Go because it is more concerned with the issue of free speech.
6woods says
I’ve been using Duck-Duck-Go exclusively for a while now for this very reason. Sick and tired of Google’s bias and corruption.
Ren says
Shut it down!
Westman says
The morality of corporate business can be determined by reading the laws intended to prevent it
Google is no exception – the laws for it will soon be written.
eduardo odraude says
Google should face a much more serious comeuppance for its PC manipulation of search results. I can’t wait the day. I would love to dance on Google’s breakup and will support the politicians and movements that aim to break Google in pieces.
MFritz says
Good idea!
LeftisruiningCanada says
Jihad watch is on the top of page 2 this morning.
Find it hard to believe that a BBC page on jihad, and some random dawa sites, receive more visits that JW
Jong Ha Lee says
It’s 2/9/28 and the search “Jihad Watch” is #1 of page 1 on Google.
LeftisruiningCanada says
Of course. But not if you search ‘jihad’.
When this website is not at the top of the first page when you search ‘jihadwatch’, we’ll really know things are going south.
alex9234 says
The U.S. should follow India’s example and find a way to force Google to play by the rules, but antitrust? Unfortunately, I don’t see it happening and no court would back it.
If Microsoft was able to walk with a slap on the wrist after they lost an antitrust lawsuit to the U.S. government back in 2000, then I can’t see a reason to put any faith behind the idea.
Mark Spahn (West Seneca, NY) says
In a test of the search engine duckduckgo.com just now, a search for “jihad” yielded Jihad Watch as the tenth search item:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=jihad&t=hg&ia=web
But what it pointed to was the current first page of Jihad Watch, giving the latest worldwide jihad news. Perhaps a better search result, for the jihad-naive searcher, would be
https://www.jihadwatch.org/islam-101 .
By the way, lakh and crore are numbers used in India; lakh = 100,000 = 10^5, and crore = 10 million = 10,000,000 = 10^7 = 100 lakh.
Noel says
I’ve mentioned this before – mojeek.com or mojeek.co.uk is a non-profit,
Independent, alternative, and unbiased search results with no user tracking.
Privacy
Mojeek was the first search engine to have a no-tracking privacy policy, and it’s quite simple, we don’t track our users. Being the first, and before it was the cool thing to do, shows that privacy is in our DNA and we’re not just jumping on a bandwagon.
Unbiased
Mojeek believes you cannot provide truly unbiased and fair results whilst aggressively promoting your own competing products. This is why we want to concentrate on doing one thing, and doing it right – “Just Search”.
Technology
Mojeek’s technology maintains the only British built crawler-based search engine with it’s own index over a billion web pages. This means our results are unique to us, they contain no other engine’s results, and offer a completely alternative view of the web.
LeftisruiningCanada says
This website is the top result when searching for ‘jihad’.
I’m going to keep trying mojeek