They Are Closing Up the Internet
Jeffrey A. Tucker
Frontier Centre for Public Policy
Such confusing times, so much in dispute, so much to discover and know. Billions of people are right now lifting their phones to their faces and searching for answers. The results they see are dramatically different from what they were just a few years ago.
You have surely noticed that Google searches aren’t what they used to be. Or maybe you haven’t, and that’s the idea. For many years, we trusted Google to give us consensus results based on the standard of crowd-sourced credibility. While the system was imperfect, it worked well enough.
The ranking in Google search was based on the status of a website, which in turn was based on how many people used the site, how many and which sites linked to it, and how much traffic it consistently generated. As part of that, you could optimize your site’s results with the use of good keywords, site maps, clean structure, and stable links. Then you could win the game.
A whole industry emerged to help you achieve this, with every expert claiming to have cracked the code.
That system is officially over. What you see on search now is what elites want you to see. They are in charge and they pick and choose results based on political and cultural issues that affect nearly everything.
It’s hard to know precisely when it came to an end, but sometime in the past year or 24 months, the new system came to be codified. The new search results aren’t based on user experience. They are based on what someone thinks you should know. That someone is the usual gang, some amorphous bureaucrats who might be influenced by political concerns or might be deep-state agents themselves. Regardless, what you see is now what some authority wants you to see.
This isn’t an accident but the fulfillment of a plan. Some people simply could not handle the freedom that the web allowed. They had to smash it, cartelize it, censor it, and pound it into a system that serves power rather than the insatiable drive of human beings to know.