Search Engines Bought Off?

I use Google as my default search engine. This afternoon, I noticed that I was being given results from Breitbart.com. They show up in the "Top Story" listings (the ones at the top with pictures), as well as being in the first few text listings. I normally look at the source of a search result before clicking on it, so I know this is something new. I tried the same searches with Bing and Yahoo and got nearly identical results.

WTF?

I haven't seen this, but my searches are usually fairly specific and non-newsy. What did you search for?

I just tried a search for likely news -- "Trump immigration stay" -- and got results from ABC News, USA Today, CBS News, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Springfield News Sun, CNN, NPR, Fortune, NBC News, etc. No Breitbart.

I am using Yahoo because I now use Firefox instead of Safari as my remote browser. I prefer Google but in truth there's not much difference.

Go into your preferences or setup. See if there's a setting for "news." Maybe somebody has set your OS for preferring Breitbart.

Although, that would be ironic wouldn't it?

One of my searches was "California drought".

If I search for "Trump immigration stay" Breitbart shows up at the bottom of the first page on Google. It shows up near the top of page three with Yahoo.

I use DuckDuckGo. Breitbart showed up 16th on the list for "California drought", which is probably on page 3 somewhere. For "Trump immigration stay", I didn't scroll down the whole list, but it didn't appear in the first 40 or so results (which kind of surprised me, actually - I'd have thought it would be there somewhere).

Droughtmonitor.unl.edu
Www.drought.ca.gov
Latimes
Californiadrought.org
Ca.water.usgs.gov
Cbsnews
Huffingtonpost

This is what I get from Google when I search for "California drought" (red lines are mine, of course).

DuckDuckGo finds that story, but it's on the border between pages 2 and 3. Also interesting is that you can specify a news search, then DuckDuckGo doesn't bring up Breitbart at all.

https://duckduckgo.com/

Somebody else pissed at Google/Breitbart.

Google Says Its Job Is to Promote Climate Change Conspiracy Theories

Quote :

Unfortunately for Google, what’s happening in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef isn’t exactly a point of view, but more of a consensus among scientists and climate experts. It’s irresponsible for Google to carelessly attach some implicit credibility to a story that is pushing bullshit climate denial.

This illustrates a VERY IMPORTANT DISTINCTION I have tried to make here before.  In a diverse world there is room for a variety of opinions, and conflicting opinions are healthy even.

However, facts are not opinions, and "alternative facts" are not equally valid as REAL facts.  They're just bullshit.  And as long as Fox News and Breitbart and the current administration are unable to make that distinction, the public at large is in real danger of being fed bullshit as reality and decisions, really important critical decisions, cannot be made on false information. Well, they can but what you get are really bad decisions.

Keep in mind that Google gets paid for its "top stories" positioning.

Is that true though? I know they have "sponsored links" on searches, but news would seem to be a totally different affair.

Google News is not the same as Google search.
A search is a search is a search...

Sorry, you have it backward.