It will no doubt come as no surprise to some, but the major search engine companies are very... selective let's say, when it comes to what people see when a search is initiated by someone who just wants information about whatever topic it is they're curious about. A few years ago I would never have believed it, but back then I was young and naive, and didn't really understand how or why certain things that most of us take for granted would occur online.
Filtering, selection and bias are actually the norm, not the exception, and evidence for this isn't at all hard to find. In fact, it's the easiest bit of research one is ever likely to undertake, for it requires simply a computer, time and a little patience (like five minutes, if your attention span is up to the task). All one has to do is follow the, extremely simple, procedure outlined in the attached video.
I highly recommend watching it, it won't take up much of your time, and I've tried it myself with 'Google', 'Bing' and 'DuckDuckGo'. The results were disturbing to say the least, although I shouldn't have been surprised.
The wording of the title of this 'MyTake' will no doubt compel some to believe that I'm once again just "promoting a conspiracy theory", but no, I'm not, because I've experienced the phenomenon first-hand, on numerous occasions. So often in fact, that I'm now using 'Yandex', a relatively unknown (in the West, at least) Russian search programme. There don't seem to be the same issues, the results displayed being far more impartial and without any bias that I've thus far been able to discern, but in any case it seems to be a better option overall.
At the moment, all the talk seems to be about how "artificial intelligence" will impact our lives, and how "scary" it is that machines can now apparently manipulate us, and give the impression they in some sense have self-awareness, but this, to me, is just a distraction from what we should be focusing on, which is 'Big Tech's unhealthy proclivity to condescendingly assume that we apparently can't be trusted to weigh up evidence and trust our own ability to form our own opinions and come to our own conclusions. They seem to believe we need their "guidance", especially when it comes to social and political issues, and this is no doubt the reason why they're doing this.
I'm not at all worried about A.I. I think the whole thing is over-hyped, misreported on, and the basic premises underlying it are just wrong (ex. that the mind is "computable"). No, I worry more about how the new technologies will be, and are, misused and misapplied.
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