Is Google Even-Handed? Is The Bear Catholic?

Here is a story of three simple searches. The search I did is for the following terms:

left wing political violence united states

 

First, the results on Bing, Microsoft’s search engine …

All but one have “left wing” or “left” in the headline.

Next, the same search on DuckDuckGo, the privacy-oriented search engine …

Again, all but one have “left wing” or “left” in the headline.

Finally, the same search on Google.

From looking at that, I’d swear that I’d searched for “right wing political violence united states”.

But wait, as they say on TV, there’s more. There’s a reason it looks like I searched for “right wing”. Here’s their dirty trick.

Google puts the terms that you search for, like say “terrorism”, in bold text on the search page that they return.

Now, look at the image above. Every place it says “right” or “right wing” it is in bold text. They are actively searching for “right” and “right wing”, despite the fact that I’d asked them to search for “left” and “left wing”.

Google is searching for “right wing” when I specifically asked them to search for “left wing”??? That is despicable, underhanded, corrupt, sleazy, sneaky, vile, I run out of words to describe that evil practice.

And there is even more. Google has refused to provide services to the US Army on moral grounds, and at the same time, their oh-so-moral cadre of programmers are developing a special search engine for China to keep their populace wrongly informed … seems like they may be beta-testing it in the US … here’s another view of the problem.

Scary stuff, folks. Best to keep in mind what my grandma, the Captain’s daughter, used to say:

You can believe half of what you read,

A quarter of what you hear,

…

And an eighth of what you say.

A very wise and amazing woman … regards to everyone on a lovely warm evening,

w.

With a hat tip to Bob Clasen for sparking the idea.