Google suppressing free speech; Google search traffic to Avalon down over half.

[ThePythonicCow]

In his article Google Is Committed To The Suppression Of Free Speech, Paul Craig Roberts uses the occasion of their recent firing of James Damore, a Harvard PhD, to raise deep questions about Google's assault on free speech and their close working with the American deep state to surveil and manipulate public knowledge.

Of Damore's firing, Roberts writes:

Having fired Damore or permitted Google’s Thought Control Czar, Danielle Brown, to fire Damore, Sundar Pichai delivered a caricature of hypocrisy. Sundar addressed Damore’s “co-workers who are questioning whether they can safely express their views in the workplace, especially those with a minority viewpoint. They too feel under threat, and that is also not OK. People must feel free to express dissent.”

Yes - as Roberts says - this is a caricature of hypocrisy - destroying exactly what you say you are supporting.

Of Google's dominance over public information, Roberts writes:

Writing in Global Research, Graham Vanbergen lists 13 websites arbitrarily branded by Google as fake news or conspiracy sites whose readership Google has managed to reduce between 19 and 67 percent:

* wsws.org fell by 67 percent
* alternet.org fell by 63 percent
* globalresearch.ca fell by 62 percent
* consortiumnews.com fell by 47 percent
* socialistworker.org fell by 47 percent
* mediamatters.org fell by 42 percent
* commondreams.org fell by 37 percent
* internationalviewpoint.org fell by 36 percent
* democracynow.org fell by 36 percent
* wikileaks.org fell by 30 percent
* truth-out.org fell by 25 percent
* counterpunch.org fell by 21 percent
theintercept.com fell by 19 percent

It is completely obvious that none of these sites are fake news or conspiracy sites. These sites are under Google censorship because they question the official lies that are used to control the explanations given to the people. With the print and TV media and NPR under its control, the ruling oligarchy is now moving to shut down all Internet explanation that differs from the official lies that are used to keep people firmly locked in The Matrix.

I would like to add ProjectAvalon.net to this list of sites being discriminated against by Google.

Here's a tally of how many search hits we've gotten each month, for the last year, from Google:

Aug/2016 4497
Sep/2016 3961
Oct/2016 3853
Nov/2016 3394
Dec/2016 3104
Jan/2017 4728
Feb/2017 3565
Mar/2017 3264
Apr/2017 2777
May/2017 2510
Jun/2017 2137
Jul/2017 1700

From 4497, down to 1700, is a fall of over 62% in traffic to ProjectAvalon.net from Google searches.

Narrowing the period to just this year, from January through July 2017, the fall in search hits from Google to ProjectAvalon.net is from 4728 to 1700, slightly steeper in a shorter time period, down over 64%.

Every month this year, 2017, the count decreases significantly from the previous month.

[Ewan]

Only going to get worse one imagines.

As a matter of interest is your starting point a particularly high figure, an all-time high, or just an average kind of result from the preceding year? (Sept2015-Aug2016)

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by Ewan (here)
Only going to get worse one imagines.

As a matter of interest is your starting point a particularly high figure, an all-time high, or just an average kind of result from the preceding year? (Sept2015-Aug2016)

Good question - I only analyzed the log files for the last year to get the above data.

I'll fire up a second round of analysis over a several year period, though I might be asleep before it finishes, in which case I'll try to post results tomorrow, around about the time of the eclipse in the US.

[Lifebringer]

Well it's a good thing us millenials don't watch fake news. LOL That's why they are heated. They want to herd us back to "Tell-Lie-vision. The jig is up and nobody gave them the memo? How dense.

¤=[Post Update]=¤

Discretion is key. you can talk truth without riling people up to gain solutions. Nerds know all about how to do it, and tis the season to be nerdy.
Fol la la la low the money crew.

[ThePythonicCow]

Even some rather main stream news outlets are noticing. US News & World Report has an article on this entitled The New Censorship -- How did Google become the internet’s censor and master manipulator, blocking access to millions of websites?, which begins:

==============

Google, Inc., isn't just the world's biggest purveyor of information; it is also the world's biggest censor.

The company maintains at least nine different blacklists that impact our lives, generally without input or authority from any outside advisory group, industry association or government agency. Google is not the only company suppressing content on the internet. Reddit has frequently been accused of banning postings on specific topics, and a recent report suggests that Facebook has been deleting conservative news stories from its newsfeed, a practice that might have a significant effect on public opinion – even on voting. Google, though, is currently the biggest bully on the block.

When Google's employees or algorithms decide to block our access to information about a news item, political candidate or business, opinions and votes can shift, reputations can be ruined and businesses can crash and burn. Because online censorship is entirely unregulated at the moment, victims have little or no recourse when they have been harmed. Eventually, authorities will almost certainly have to step in, just as they did when credit bureaus were regulated in 1970. The alternative would be to allow a large corporation to wield an especially destructive kind of power that should be exercised with great restraint and should belong only to the public: the power to shame or exclude.

==============

Notice where this article is going - the need for "the authorities" to step in and control this.

The old "problem, reaction, solution", leading to greater global tyranny ... once again rears its tyrannical head.

[ThePythonicCow]

In related news, Google is also

1. the dominant player in the Web browser market, with its Chrome browser,
2. the dominant player in the smart phone market, with its Android based phones, and
3. the dominant "enforcer" of the move toward more secure websites, increasingly requiring https and policing SSL/TLS security certificate standards, as I have been documenting in my How the Elite Bastards will control the Wild Wild Web. thread.

[Baby Steps]

Hi,
I remember being unable to go to Avalon from Ethiopia, and in other places being told that it may be dangerous content.

Is it that people want to go to Avalon and can't?
Or is it that threads here discussing a particular issue, are Trumped by other sites, so a search is optimised for sites that Google chooses, and Avalon is de-optimised?

If that is the case can we do anything to improve our accessibility? Could we get smarter with titles of threads or the tags?

[Pam]

When I look up Project Avalon on the Google search engine PA pops up as a first choice. I am not sure how they are limiting traffic to the site? If I try to get to PA by describing the forum I don't get a hit, however. Maybe their algorithms are more subtle.

[uzn]

Some image-ination

[uzn]

Google paid Apple 3 Billion Dollars to be the Default search engine for this year (2017). In the year 2014 it was just 1 Billion.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZYqxYYjKLpg

Google is paying Apple billions per year to remain on the iPhone, Bernstein says

Google will pay Apple about $3 billion this year to remain the default search engine on iOS devices, Bernstein says.
The licensing payments make up a large bulk of Apple's services revenue.
There are pros and cons to the payments.

Google is paying Apple billions of dollars to remain the default search engine on iPhones and iPads, Bernstein said in a note to investors on Monday.
The firm believes that Google will pay Apple about $3 billion this year, up from $1 billion just three years ago, and that Google's licensing fees make up a large bulk of Apple's services business.

Apple has been touting its services business as a quickly growing segment of the company, noting that it expects that branch alone will soon be as large as a Fortune 500 company.
"Court documents indicate that Google paid Apple $1B in 2014, and we estimate that total Google payments to Apple in FY 17 may approach $3B," Bernstein analyst A.M. Sacconaghi Jr. said. "Given that Google payments are nearly all profit for Apple, Google alone may account for 5% of Apple's total operating profits this year, and may account for 25% of total company OP growth over the last two years."
Bernstein sees pros and cons in the payments.
Sacconaghi said that Google might decide to back away from paying Apple any licensing fees if it feels confident enough that its search engine is so popular Apple won't include any other option by default.
On the other hand, Sacconaghi said that Apple's iOS devices contribute about 50 percent to Google's mobile search revenue, which means Google might be too afraid to walk away from its licensing deal with Apple. In this case, it's a win-win for Apple and Google.

Source:
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/14/goog...bernstein.html

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by peterpam (here)
When I look up Project Avalon on the Google search engine PA pops up as a first choice.

Yes - by all the reports that I've seen - if you specify something in your search that directly points to a particular website, then that website will be included in the results, as expected.

The problem for "alt-media" websites that apparently don't subscribe to world views compatible with Google's world view is that if you look to research some topic, without indicating that you expect results from certain websites or know of something specific to certain websites, then you will not learn about those (de-rated) websites from the first few pages of your Google search results.

In other words, if for example you ask about, say, "Corey Goode", with no mention of Avalon, Bill Ryan or similar in your search terms, then you won't learn about Avalon until a single hit on the third page of Google results, nor about Clif High's or the Dark Journalists critiques until page six of the Google results. Almost all the Google search results in the first few pages are (at first appearances to me) more or less "pro Goode".

Google has immense control over which search results are going to get the most hits, by controlling which search results are in the first page or two of the search results. I have very little doubt that they use that control to better present the search results, in accordance with their world view and priorities. I have even less doubt that their world view and priorities are not the same as mine.

(I'm still fiddling with extracting the rate we receive Google search hits for earlier years ... a couple of silly 20 second errors on my part of cost my poor, uncomplaining (over clocked 16 thread Ryzen!) CPU some extra hours of redoing the (nearly) same boring commands multiple times now.)

[CurEus]

This may be an extension of the "Advertiser friendly" Youtube demonetization problem many alternative researchers are experiencing under the guise of "fake news".
I was told last week to remove Chrome as a bowsers

[ThePythonicCow]

Ok - here's the history, since the beginning of "Avalon time", of the number of Google search hits per month that ProjectAvalon.net has received:

Notes:

1. The counts in the above graph for the last year are higher than the counts in the table in my opening post, because I used a broader search pattern, suitable for use over the entire 7 year period.
2. The count for the very last (right-most) column is for August 2017, which is lower in part because August isn't done yet.
3. The counts for a few months in early 2011 are low or zero because I am missing log files for that period.
4. The day "01", as in "06/01/17" should refer to all the days of the month, not just the first day, so "06/01/17" really means "June 2017".
5. For the record, and probably meaningful only to myself or Ilie, I counted all Apache log file lines that had "google" in field 11, but that did not have "google.com/bot" anywhere at all on the line.

[Franny]

This is a widespread and growing concern to many.

Google displayed it's bias during the US elections. Entering a term such as "Hillary is" would result in a list of mostly positive returns and entering "Trump is" would result in a list of mostly negative returns.

On Bing, it was generally the opposite.

So, here is an article Global Research has posted:

Think Tank Proves Mass Censorship of Internet Worldwide. The Role of Search Engines. What are the Solutions
“The only legitimate role of search engines is to provide relevant search results, to facilitate public access to information. The only legitimate role of social media platforms is to facilitate public access to communications. … Content carriers have no legal nor moral authority to be self-appointed censors, nor to be self-proclaimed arbiters of Fact or Truth.” – Prince Judge Matthew of Thebes
At the request of the international Judiciary, the Council on Alternative Policy Studies (CAPS), an inter-governmental university think tank, has issued a ground-breaking exposé report proving the shocking reality of full-scale mass censorship of the Internet worldwide, and giving practical solutions for individuals to gain open access to uncensored Internet resources."

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by Paul (here)
Of Damore's firing, Paul Craig Roberts writes:

Having fired Damore or permitted Google’s Thought Control Czar, Danielle Brown, to fire Damore, Sundar Pichai delivered a caricature of hypocrisy. Sundar addressed Damore’s “co-workers who are questioning whether they can safely express their views in the workplace, especially those with a minority viewpoint. They too feel under threat, and that is also not OK. People must feel free to express dissent.”

Damore was not the only one shut down by Google this last week.

As reported by Zerohedge at One Statistics Professor Was Just Banned By Google: Here Is His Story, a statistics professor at Georgetown University, Salil Mehtam, was banned by Google on this last Friday, 18 Aug 2017.

Salil used gmail for his email account and he used google to post his http://statisticalideas.blogspot.com blog. Salil's email, blog (which seems to be back up now), and other Georgetown University pages on Google servers that included his material, were all shut down, without notice or explanation, beyond a "you violated our terms of service" explanation, a couple of days later.

The power being accumulated in a few corporations (In the US at least, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple come to mind right off, as well as the cartels that control Internet Service access, cell phone access, and main stream news) is dangerous ...

---

"Ask not what your country can do for you ... ask what a few giant corporations and cartels can do to you!"

-- apologies to John F Kennedy.

[Tam]

Yes, I've noticed that it's become increasingly harder to find decent information regarding conspiratorial or esoteric fields from Google as of late. Most search results either push a Materialist agenda, or reinforce it by linking you to some of the more questionable sources for this information (think along the lines of those all-caps Youtube videos that slow down grainy, scrambled footage of Hilary Clinton blinking and show it as proof that she is a demon Reptilian whose skin suit is slipping off).

I always had been concerned that this would be one of the pitfalls of the internet; it would be far easier to control information. But then again, perhaps it was never any better? Since before the internet, one had to actively search for information at libraries, which could easily be controlled.

We can only hope that we evolve to be more vigilant.

I recently discovered DuckDuckGo. It's a Chrome Plugin that I now use religiously, as heavily as I do AdBlock. It essentially replaces the Google Search engine, without being total crap like most other search engines out there. Firefox is also good for the time, though I have personal gripes with its design.

If any of you like Chrome's UI, but aren't a fan of its search engine algorithms, DuckDuckGo is for you. Feel free to PM if any of you have questions.

[uzn]

DuckDuckGo is Google search but Google is not getting your ID. DuckDuckGo is simply anonymising your search at Google.
https://duckduckgo.com/
no tracking, no adds, no personal data gathering

[amor]

For someone who counts herself lucky to get the machine turned on, Paul, would you explain what search words would help to pull up Project Avalon? I came here through Project Camelot and therefore, the question never entered my mind. Is there a list of terms which would get PA ? If you post these, we might have a clue and suggest more terms.

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by amor (here)
For someone who counts herself lucky to get the machine turned on, Paul, would you explain what search words would help to pull up Project Avalon? I came here through Project Camelot and therefore, the question never entered my mind. Is there a list of terms which would get PA ? If you post these, we might have a clue and suggest more terms.

Just adding "projectavalon" to your Google search terms will move Project Avalon further up the Google search results, and on to the first page of the results in many cases.

Or, if you want to use Google to search -only- on Project Avalon, add "site:projectavalon.net" to your Google search terms.

[Snoweagle]

Don't worry about it. The world is moving to a war footing so some sort of squeeze is considered necessary as far as I read the sign. And to be honest, the PTB have too many other technical problems to resolve.

Project Avalon will be around for a long time yet. It's a bit like Bitcoin. As much as the bankers try to crush Bitcoin by exploiting rapid invest and divest to enforce a crash, they must be horrified as after their efforts Bitcoin is still there, with an ever increasing user base. (Not interested in the value but the perpetual presence).

Thanks for the tips.