Avoiding the Tech Giants Biased On Line Tools

Avoiding the Tech Giants Biased On Line Tools

A recent word from our increasingly connected world is “google”.  When we “google” something, we search for it on the on-line world wide web, and we expect a neutral response from the Google search engine on where to find it, or references to it.  But the response from Google is not neutral.  It is shaped by a complex algorithm reflecting both the views of the Google developers and maintainers, and our own historical preferences.



The algorithm in the Google search engine has been shown to be biased and insidious in its search choices politically and commercially.  Particularly insidious are ephemeral and subliminal suggestions built into the google algorithm.  According to psychologist Dr. Robert Epstein google searches in 2016 and 2018 manipulated large numbers of voters toward democrat candidates without them even knowing it.  To be noted is that Dr. Epstein’s politics are left-central and pro Hillary, so his study is not right wing biased.  See the first link below for Dr. Epstein’s testimony before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing held on Google and its censorship policy on July 16, 2019.



 “Duckduckgo”, in spite of its’ strange name, is an unbiased and non-tracking search engine, and is the best alternative search engine out there. DuckDuckGo doesn’t collect any of your personal information or store your history, and does not follow you around with ads because they have nothing to sell to advertisers.



DuckDuckGo doesn’t provide personalized results – all users will see the same results for a given search query. Rather than returning thousands of results, it emphasizes on returning the best results, and extracts those results from more than 400 sources. It’s a smart search engine (uses semantic search technique like Google) that depends on a highly evolved contextual library for intuiting the user’s intent.



The “Brave” web browser is a viable and neutral alternative to the major web browsers.



“Infogalactic” is a neutral replacement for “Wikipedia”, which has become very slanted from user input.



Using all three of the above allows bypassing the tech giants push to slant information toward a leftist point of view and promotes online honesty.  There is a bit of a learning curve.  Results don’t look exactly like the Google-Microsoft-Wikipedia bunch, but small price to pay for online results that are not slanted left by the tech giants’ algorithms.



There is also a Facebook look alike called “gab.ai” that removes Zuckerberg & company’s bias, but I don’t have any experience yet with it.





https://youtu.be/mhwZcB1spV8?t=8



https://aibrt.org/downloads/EPSTEIN_&_ROBERTSON_2017-A_Method_for_Detecting_Bias_in_Search_Rankings-AIBRT_WP-17-02_6-1-17.pdf



http://www.canirank.com/blog/analysis-of-political-bias-in-internet-search-engine-results/



https://thefederalist.com/2017/06/14/keep-online-browsing-unfiltered-political-propaganda/





Ray Gruszecki

October 31, 2019