Friday, 17 June 2022 — The New Dark Age

The Message is: Don’t Use Google to search for anything ‘Contraversial’ as You won’t Find It!

I wondered why readership, according to my WordPress stats, has plummeted since March of this year and it’s because the Google ‘search’ engine is filtering out searches that include ‘williambowles.info’ as part of the address. It’s no doubt connected to my coverage of events in the Ukraine, given the date, March 2022, when the Russian military operation began. It also implies that these censoring tools were already in place!

Using Startpage instead of Google, results in just a handful of additional results but because Startpage uses the Google engine, this was to be expected.

The best so far have been DuckDuckGo and Ecosia which both return actual links to articles on this site. Google, by comparison, returns just 2 hits, the home page and the About page, that’s all I get! So that explains why I’m now getting so few visits, censorship. I might add, that there are over 27,000 stories on this site and no doubt, people doing specific searches would be denied access to any hits on this site!

And another thing about Google; it’s insinuated itself into the essential elements that make the Internet work, making it de facto indispensible to its functioning. I proved this to myself a couple of months ago by canceling my Google subscription and a lot of things I did normally on the Internet, no longer worked!

Corporate capitalism at work, creating an effective monopoly out of what was meant to be a shared, collective resource.

I might also add that it’s only because I have around 1000 subscribers, possibly a lot more via my old Google Feedburner feed that I no longer have access to, that I get the readership that I do. But of course, what the Google censor  does is deny access to alternative views of events that people might be searching for. It’s insidious and apparently legal! Isn’t democracy wonderful.

I have since discovered that virtually all independent news and information sites are getting the same treatment! This is blanket censorship across a vast range of sources!