The Google Father

In the video Andreas Ekstrom asked people why they used Google as a search engine. People answered because it works, they didn’t know of any other alternatives, and lastly because it provided unbiased search results.  Well If Mr. Ekstrom would have asked me the same question I probably would have answered the same.  I don’t think there can be any unbiased searches in today’s world. There are simply too many variables that one must go through to get a truly unbiased answer from a search engine. You must be specific in what the subject is being searched and  multiple search platforms should be used.

I use google because It has worked for many years and I have never needed to change my search engine. As of right now google is the top search engine used, followed by Bing, and then Yahoo.  We always here the term just “google it”, it’s a catchy phrase. You don’t hear people say, “Bing it” or just “Yahoo it” it doesn’t sound the same. Almost everything that is popular today is by word of mouth. Even Professors, Teachers, and Colleagues from work advise us to use google as a tool. But they do not tell us that we must be specific in what we search.  

As far as being unbiased, google finds what we type in the search bar and it has many resources from where it gets the information. If something else comes up that is not what we are looking for then we must be more specific on what we are searching for. Google has the power to manipulate whatever search pops up after we hit the search button. In the examples that Mr. Andreas Ekstrom used I tried to search Michelle Obama pictures with the image of the monkey. I could not find one if I just typed Michelle Obama. I had to type Michelle Obama meme and whoa did I get a lot of unfavorable images. I also googled Anders Behring Breivik and did not come up with dog poop on a side walk. Maybe Google manually erased the images like they did for Michelle Obama since it’s been almost six years. I can understand why they would be outraged when this attack happened to the then First Lady of the United States of America. It was very wrong for what they did, Google was protecting the dignity and image of the First Lady.  

Now why did they not do that For Anders? Was it because they were afraid of backlash for correcting the face of a monster that just murdered innocent men, women, and children? Who knows but it is certain that google has the power to manipulate whatever the world searches through its search engine. So, what if this happens to one of us. How do we protect ourselves from slander? What can we do if we become victim to a cyber-attack on our image? Who do we hold accountable for the actions of other people? The truth is we cannot, we can only hope that will never happen to us. In today’s time we have been molded to be politically correct, be afraid to voice our opinions and accept the unacceptable for us not to look bad in front of our peers.