Eric Zuesse

Here is the evidence I’ve come across which indicates to me that the Google search-engine is now appallingly corrupt, and for which reason I am seeking (and hope to see in reader-comments at sites that publish this article) an alternative explanation for what presently appear to me to be systematic efforts by Google to hide crucial information and understanding from the public — to hide it so that the public can be manipulated to tolerate increasing control, by billionaires, of their governments (the diminution of democracy):

THE BACKGROUND

I am an independent free-lance U.S. investigative journalist who has lost respect for both of America’s political parties. I published previously and was recently searching for on the Web, two articles laying out a case, arguing that when James Comey announced, on 5 July 2016, that the FBI would not bring to a grand jury and seek indictments of Hillary Clinton, for her violating six specific U.S. criminal laws (which top FBI had actually prohibited from even being investigated), he was defending his decision on the basis of severe deceptions of the public. The appropriate indictments for the FBI to have sought, I argued, did not entail any need for the FBI to be able to prove criminal intent on her part (such as did the issues that Comey was focusing on in his announcement). The indictments would instead be strictly for her privatization of her State Department emails, since that privatization was even admitted to by Clinton and it clearly violated those six federal criminal laws (with total maximum sentences of 72 years in prison). Comey was, at that time, unwarrantedly and secretly protecting Hillary Clinton, from any possibility of being prosecuted for her clearest criminal-law violations — the easiest-to-win charges against her — in the entire emails matter. Those two articles, setting this case out, against both Clinton and Comey, were:

"In Clinton Case, Obama Administration Nullifies 6 Criminal Laws"

"Why Hillary Clinton's Email Case Is Still Not Closed”

GOOGLE’S NEWS-SUPPRESSION

On 10 June 2017, I did a Google search for those two articles, by googling in one search, the seven words shown on the following line:

zuesse washingtonsblog comey emails six laws Hillary

Nothing appeared on the first page of the Google search-results that would bring me directly to either article. I was stunned. I had never encoutered the likes of this before.

I then did a duckduckgo.com search of the same seven-word string, and the first page of search-results at duckduckgo.com brought me to multiple web-pages for each of those two articles, including both of the specific web-pages that I’ve linked-to just above here.

HOW GOOGLE HAS CHANGED

I happen to know from prior experience that what has changed is the Google search-engine — it’s gotten appallingly worse; duckduckgo.com has not gotten any better, so far as I’ve been able to determine; but, Google has gotten a lot worse.

Until recently, this type of problem — the exclusion from Google of web-pages that expose things which the people who control the U.S. government want the public not to know or certainly not to understand — simply did not occur. In fact, until recently, I considered google to be the best search-engine, though no search-engine is good. Suddenly, google seems to have become the worst of a mediocre-at-best lot. (Since, sadly, no existing search-engine is good.) How can any researcher trust a search-engine that censors-out well-documented but ‘unpleasant’ (to the powers-that-be) facts?

GOOGLE’S PRIOR ROTTENNESS

I have previously indicated that Google (now calling itself by a conglomerate name, “Alphabet Inc.”) has hired contractors to threaten independent news websites that publish articles that Google will treat as being ‘fake news’, so as to make the owners of those sites fear loss of their advertising income-stream from Google if the site does not promptly remove specific articles that those contractors request them to remove. I had first gotten indication of this fact when one of the sites that publishes some of my artcles became threatened about one of my articles. (You’ll see my article about that incident, at several sites on the first page of the search-results for the string — but without quotation-marks — “zuesse google rinf” at https://duckduckgo.com/?q=zuesse+google+rinf&t=hz&ia=web, but not at https://www.google.com/search?q=zuesse+google+rinf — where “rinf” itself is rejected as being in the first page of a search — and so this is yet another example of the phenomenon I’m discussing here: Google-Alphabet trying to block the public from finding certain types of truthful information.)

Only later did I come to realize that Google does not itself issue these threats but instead employs contractors to do it for them so as to protect itself from the guilt.

THE POSSIBILITY OF A LESS-MALIGN INTERPRETATION

Again: I am open to innocent explanations of this phenomenon. I hope to see such innocent explanations at sites which will be publishing this article, in reader-comments; and, as usual, I shall be submitting this article, without charge of any sort, to virtually all English-language newsmedia that cover international affairs; so, perhaps there will be some thoughtful reader-comments about this significant matter, at a number of such sites; and, I shall be interested in the views that others have regarding it. This possible censorship of Web-search results could warp not only my findings, but the findings of everyone who uses google.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity, and of Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics.