Walter GreggOn this page: Main Content. Search Engine Indexes.
'I Disapprove of What You Say, But I Will Defend to the Death Your Right to Say It'
(Evelyn Beatrice Hall on Voltaire; see quoteinvestigator.com 2015-06-01).
May 2017. I was just reminded of the importance of keeping a little list of alternative search engines handy. Earlier this year, Google blacklisted the website 'Natural News'. Search results pointing to 140,000 published pages were summarily removed. Even the site's home page was removed. See cantechletter.com/2017/02/google-blacklists-pseudoscience-website-natural-news/.
The power to instantly and totally censor a speaker, hiding even their very existence through the removal of their home page, is truly chilling. To be sure, conventional wisdom holds, with some merit, that this well-known site consists of 'fake news' and pseudoscience. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_News. What's more, it's been suggested that the site was actually blacklisted for having links that took people somewhere other than the text said and not for content reasons. The site has been reindexed, so that strikes me as the more likely reason.
Still, it illustrates the awesome power the search engines wield. And they are using it. Last year, under enormous pressure to 'do something' about fake news, Google announced that it would ban sites deemed 'fake' from using its advertising platform. See NYTimes.com: Google banning fake news using its ads (2016-11-15).
But who decides what's fake? The New York Times? The Washington Times? That's far too much power to allow anyone to have. Hence, I've ressurected my list of well known reputable English language search engines from 2003. It's now limited to https and is a very short list. Still, a site currently blacklisted on one might be indexed on another.