Want to prove we live in an Orwellian universe?
Get people to do the internet search trick.
Pick a topic, any topic.
Now do a Google search and make a note of how many results it throws up.
Next, clicking “show all” along the way, navigate to the very end page. As far as you can go. Now make a note of the results.
So now take the initial search results minus the results shown when you’ve reached the end and ask yourself - Where have all the other results gone?
You need to try this yourself. I searched “google search” and initially got 11,810,000,000 results which was narrowed to 10 pages. After clicking “show all” the results recorded 12,180,000,000. 37 pages later I was at the end of the track and there were now only 365 results shown.
I tried “Liverpool”. 608,000,000 results are shown as having been picked up by the search engine. However, once again, when I tried to get to the ‘out there’ results found near the end I’m only getting 45 pages and 443 results. Are they kidding me - 443 results about Liverpool?
I tried DuckDuckGo.
Coronavirus – 14 pages
CIA – 10 pages
Azov Battalion- 14 pages (yes more than the CIA).
Were your results similar to mine?
The fact is when we come to internet searches we have become reliant on what is obviously a very flawed system. The scope of our knowledge base has been given set parameters. It was probably sold because we rarely used more than the first page of results, trusting the information served up to us by technology.
At the end of March 2022 Google boasts that over the last seven years it has reduced irrelevant searches by over 50%. Dismissing the rest as “junk”. Having made over 5,000 changes in 2021 alone it would be impossible to unpick how our internet search engines have become so dire.
It wasn’t always like this. There was a time you could just keep searching. It was often the way you found your way to people who had information and/or opinion that countered the narrative. Not any more.
A decision (political/technocratic) must have been taken to hobble the internet this way.
By excluding those with less traffic (and sponsorship), you will find that these online search results will be heavily biased towards those whose interests are well represented online.
Meanwhile, if you fall into the “misinformation” mire, you and your work will never be visible again. Only those who know you are aware of your presence as you will have been deemed harmful!
In IT terms the internet searches we have now are called a walled garden. Just like a herd of sheep they have penned in our experience. They decide what information we can and can’t have access to. It’s not like navigation beyond the walls isn’t impossible, it’s just harder.
It’s that extra effort that puts people off from researching things for themselves. Now, for someone starting from scratch, wanting to research a controversial matter, that’s a lot harder than it was.
Is it enough to say people can look into things for themselves these days knowing the search results will be unlikely to counter the official narrative. The purpose of the walled garden is to keep you from hearing an opposing view. Keep the sheeple safe?
My thanks for this go to Melissa and Aaron Dyke who are bringing out some quality documentaries online at the moment. Melissa often references the Truman Show. her reference is that what they’ve done to the search engines is akin to Truman bumping up against the reality of a fake horizon.
Can we find our way through this artificial time?
