Google removes Pirate Bay domains from search results citing Dutch court order
Google Search itself is now a threat to the open web. Forget Chrome.<p>Google willingly interferes, in a heavy-handed way, with both search suggestions and search results, with both Google Search and YouTube. Just try to look up any topic on YouTube, and you&#x27;ll have to get past the hundreds of mainstream media channels covering the event, before you actually find the original video. They artificially promote &quot;authoritative sources&quot; which are anything but, since they may be second-hand coverage of original videos that get buried in search results.<p>Google&#x27;s results are not only manipulated by clever SEO people[0], but by employees[1], in direct contradiction to Sundar Pichai&#x27;s sworn testimony. Some of that is very defendable. But there&#x27;s zero transparency. Given their search monopoly, and that most people aren&#x27;t aware that search results are manipulated, Google Search <i>is</i> the web. Websites that get delisted are presumed to have ceased to exist. Focusing on browsers (Firefox) is good, but no longer enough.<p>That&#x27;s why Google Search itself is now a threat to the open web. Switch to other engines. DuckDuckGo, Brave Search are the ones I trust, and there&#x27;s tons more.<p>[0]: how many times have you tried looking for a machine&#x27;s user manual, mistyped the model number, and somehow &quot;found&quot; a webpage with the manual for a product that didn&#x27;t exist? and then modified the model number further and found more results from the same website, with relevant keywords and yet another incorrect model number? My understanding of SEO isn&#x27;t good enough to know how they do that. I don&#x27;t believe websites can dynamically alter their index to show up for so many typoed search queries.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@mikewacker&#x2F;googles-manual-interventions-in-search-results-a3b0cfd3e26c" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@mikewacker&#x2F;googles-manual-interventions-...</a>