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But where is the European Premium Google alternative?

https://www.ixquick.eu/

I get this argument. And you're not entirely wrong because it's not an entirely black and white issue. But remember that freedom of speech is an ideal. It is not limited to the first amendment which provides the legal right to keep the government from restricting your speech. It's not something that only applies to other people.

Take Slashdot comments for example. Is it censorship if people have their comments voted down? Everyone can still see them if they choose to. But I think no one would argue that without some way for the quality posts to float to the top and the shitty trolls to sink to the bottom, slashdot's forum would be a giant pile of crap that no-one would want to wade through. And should it allow anonymous commentary? There are a lot of REALLY good reasons to let people comment on something anonymously, but it opens the obvious security hole of letting a single person control the majority of the debate. You've got to expect shills, trolls, and sock puppets any time you've got a group of eyeballs.

Same damn thing applies to news aggregators. Editors at news agencies too. Instead of individuals making submissions, you've got the wide and wild smorgasbord of news agencies, Reuters reporters, crack-pots, and crack-pot Reuters reporters working for news agencies. If you feed a raw and random assortment of news tidbits, people will get their news blurbs elsewhere. Determining what is and isn't "news worthy" is the job of a news editor. Every act they do is the sort of thing where they soft-censor non-news-worthy stuff simply by not showing it front and center. Only one thing can get the top spot at any given time. So how do you balance that?

Flat out censoring is wrong. If they have a profile of a... white supremacist, it's ethically wrong to simply block all content from the KKK. Connecting those two monsters to each other is, while an ostensibly bad thing, a better option than letting Google not connect them.

Having some sort of "But that's bullshit" flag from Google might be the best. It would be better than them trying to silently and selectively squash information. That sort of power would go right to their heads and would be abused and for sale within a year. They certainly have the power to so, it's only the fear of public backlash that keeps them from being monsters.

Google's business model is to be useful to people so they get eyeballs and sell ads. Popularity is certainly their goal. If 90% of the populace violently burned down anything saying anything remotely nice about the purple-people, Google wouldn't commit suicide by defending them. Probably. And so I think it's really important to remind people to get REALLY FUCKING PISSED at any effort by the gate-keepers of the Internet, namely Google and Facebook for this topic, to try and censor the Internet.

Having Google or Facebook build some sort of "truth-rating-agency" that judges all content on the Internet for truth sounds like a a path to a real dystopian hellscape. You know there would be "Google Truth Optimization" right around the corner just like SEO bullshit. How much of our sovereignty to we want to give a single self-serving group?

And what's the solution to mind-controlling google overlords? Alternative search engines. Any single point of failure is bound to fail eventually.

You can use their Start Page Search if you want Google results.

For those that don't know: ixquick.eu if you DON'T want Google results.
ixquick.com or startpage.com if you DO want Google results.

Of course none of the above will track you.

People still use google?

If you have to have Google searches, at least do it through Startpage.

If you want to avoid Google in your searches use The Ixquick EU page, not "ixquick.com" which also uses Google.

Good luck with that, google

And none of them were from me.

The difference between startpage.com, ixquick.com and ixquick.eu is that SP.com, IQ.com use Google, IQ.eu does not.

And none of them were from me.

The difference between startpage.com, ixquick.com and ixquick.eu is that SP.com, IQ.com use Google, IQ.eu does not.