Internet News Filters
Posted: 2014-07-06. Categories: Online Services

I know that most people are really picky about the browser they use.  I used to love Netscape and I had a very hard time switching back to Internet Explorer (IE), I was one of the last holdouts.

The usage share of web browsers. Source: Media...

The usage share of web browsers. Source: Median values from summary table. Internet Explorer (38.9%) Firefox (25.5%) Google Chrome (20.2%) Safari (7.7%) Opera (2.9%) Mobile browsers (7.1%)

Today, we can’t afford to be that loyal to browsers.

I completed a search in Google for keywords: [hanna wyoming microchip], selected the News tab, because I wanted to see what news articles had been written on the subject.  This is what came up:

Google News results: hanna wyoming microchip

  1. http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/Fake-News/fl/Study-Finds-1-in-3 

    About – News & Issuesby David EmeryJun 11, 2014
    <National Report> Scientists at the Wyoming Institute of Technology (WIT) have … shocking 1 in 3 Americans has been implanted with an RFID microchip. … chip implants were underway in the small town of HannaWyoming, …

Just the one result was all that Google returned.

Not satisfied with the results I decided to check Bing.  Low and behold there were a lot more results than Google had shown. In fact, I got back 3,660 results.

Bing News search results: hanna wyoming microchip

Are we to believe that Google really only values the opinion of About.com? Whether the story is true or not is immaterial, as even the article that Google returns tells users that anyone who doesn’t check for multiple sources is “to blame for their own stupidity, not us.” It makes me wonder if this is a practical joke by Google to drive people who actually value checking the facts insane. Fact-checking sites have been proven to be incorrect, invalid, or not even making an effort to validate the truth. If we’re to take any article with a grain of salt, any individual fact-checking site should be only given the weight of two grains.

Don’t think for a second that censorship is only happening in Europe.  It’s being done here, only on a much quieter scale.  When I’m doing research these days, I use three or four browsers and search engines because they will all come up with different results.  I have to tell you, they are doing their level best to hide anything important and make it inaccessible.  [Google faces censorship accusations as it deals with 50,000 EU requests to be forgotten]

Google estimates that the Internet today contains about 5 million terabytes of data (1TB = 1,000GB), and claims it has only indexed a paltry 0.04% of it all! You could fit the whole Internet on just 200 million Blu-Ray disks. [Read more.]

Don’t think for a minute you’re getting everything from an Internet search and don’t depend on Google to run and fetch it for you.  It’s not going to happen.  Here is a list of search engines to check out.

 

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