{"id":24091,"date":"2020-08-09T17:11:01","date_gmt":"2020-08-09T21:11:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/?p=24091"},"modified":"2020-08-09T17:11:01","modified_gmt":"2020-08-09T21:11:01","slug":"google-search-has-cancelled-dissenting-opinion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/?p=24091","title":{"rendered":"Google Search Has Cancelled Dissenting Opinion"},"content":{"rendered":"

RON UNZ
\nThe Unz Review<\/p>\n

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Back in early May, Google had taken the remarkable step of\u00a0deranking our entire website<\/a>, placing our many thousands of content pages near the absolute bottom of its search results, where almost no one would ever see them. If a user included the keyword \u201cunz\u201d in a search string, our pages would still come up, but otherwise they would be almost totally invisible. So people specifically looking for our website could still find it, but almost no one else.<\/span><\/p>\n

Google holds a monopoly over worldwide search results, having a total market share greater than 90% and therefore functioning as a global gatekeeper to the Internet, so this harsh action had serious consequences. Our regular daily traffic dropped by 15% or more, especially reducing the inflow of casual new visitors who might discover our alternative media webzine in an unrelated search. The national wave of urban turmoil that broke out at the end of that same month soon overwhelmed this decline and lifted our traffic to new heights. But the severe loss of new readers remained. So although our daily pageviews have set new records, the number of daily visitors to our website has remained substantially diminished.<\/span><\/p>\n

Then a couple of weeks ago,\u00a0various journalists reported<\/a>\u00a0an even more severe manipulation of Google\u2019s search system, with dozens of top Republican-leaning websites, including Breitbart and Drudge, suddenly discovering that all their content had entirely disappeared from Google although liberal-leaning publications remained unaffected. This search engine \u201cglitch\u201d ended within a day and the conservative websites reappeared, but there was widespread speculation that Google had added a \u201ckill switch\u201d that could cleanse the Internet of all right-wing content at a moment\u2019s notice, and someone had inadvertently tested this powerful new media weapon in public, thereby revealing its existence.<\/span><\/p>\n

A presidential election is less than three months away, and conservatives have long complained that the Silicon Valley tech giants are biased against them. So the very real possibility that Google was road-testing the ability to \u201cdisappear\u201d all their publications at some crucial moment would surely raise concerns even among the most level-headed individuals.<\/span><\/p>\n

Therefore, I naturally assumed that this crucial issue of biased search results would become a central point of questioning during last week\u2019s Congressional testimony of Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Surely, the Republican members of the committee would ask him why all the websites in their ideological camp had suddenly disappeared from Google, and whether this suggested deliberate plans by the Monopolist of Mountain View to slant its search results against their side of the aisle. Google displays the results of\u00a0six billion searches<\/em>\u00a0each day, so this would probably have a political impact millions of times greater than the alleged \u201cRussiaGate manipulation\u201d that had so dominated our national headlines for many months.<\/span><\/p>\n

However, I was sorely mistaken. Neither the national newspapers nor other publications reported any such line of questioning. This suggested that the Republican members of the committee were either reluctant to antagonize their powerful witness, or more likely, were just too ignorant of the Internet to realize that if Google suddenly \u201cdisappeared\u201d all their media outlets, many of their voters and their own seats in Congress would soon follow. So I was forced to listen to the entire three and a half hour hearing on YouTube, then afterward hunted around in vain for a complete transcript.<\/span><\/p>\n