by RedactCapital
To put it shortly, Google has been meddling in search results of controversial topics for months, and now you can no longer adequately verify that.
Google will list 200,000,000 results at the top on the first page, except if you keep clicking on the pages at the bottom, you will eventually run into a brick wall. The search results at the top of the page will adjust to something absurdly low, like 200-300 total results for any topic queried. This is because non-Google approved publications and websites no longer appear for general search terms for hot button issues (such as elections, spending bills, big pharma, you name it), and it’s been this way for the better part of a year now.
Today, Google implemented infinite scroll. In laymen’s terms, the typical “pages” you see at the bottom no longer exists, it now functions like models we see on social media platforms. This also means that you can no longer see the actual count of the search results that Google is willing to provide you.
This appears to have been implemented in the US within the last few hours silently and Google still has pages for other countries. If you’d like to, you can try this out for yourself if you live in another country/own a VPN. Search any controversial (or even non-controversial) topic, find the last page, check the top of the page for accurate search count results. If you need for me to explain why this is a bad thing, I don’t know what else to tell you. It strips us of our own ability to read varied reporting on a nuanced subject at bare minimum, as they assume we don’t have the capability of forming conclusions responsibly for ourselves.
Google continues to destroy the internet and most people won’t notice this or won’t care