Advertising aside, Google's search problems also extend to their political and/or economic agenda (outside of paid advertisements). I do a lot of writing, and often look up articles I have read in the past, sometimes the distant past, in order to reference them in the footnotes of my articles and posts. Many articles on politically controversial subjects (especially those that reflect poorly on "establishment" positions) either don't come up at all or are extremely hard to find, despite putting in numerous, specific keywords. Doubtless this is (at least in part) a function of Google's curated "reliability algorithm" that deranks (and in some cases hides completely) sites and sources that Google deems less credible than mainstream, establishment sources (a black-box decision making process that often ranks credible sites below larger, "corporate" outlets with a much worse track record of accuracy). While one could argue that this sort of algorithmic sorting has some use in its news section, when it comes to search this is a terrible policy. A search engine that hides or obfuscates the specific information or article I'm looking for because it doesn't match their agenda is worthless as a search tool.
