My Response to Fox's Freakout over Google.

First Posted: 03.12.2015

On the one hand fox 'news' (not the local affiliate morning news. The national thing) lists itself as 'entertainment' rather than 'news'. On the other, even as I'm laughing about one of the more blatantly partisan outlets freaking out, I have to ask who decides accuracy.

Stuff like vaccination statistics is one thing since hard numbers that are, presumably, difficult to twist around in new and clever ways to make them spout party dogma. On the other you have the net neutrality debate, which I am very much in favor of by the way, where it becomes less clear at a glance and a case could get made that Google is shaping the results to fit its world view. Let's face it, on something like net neutrality Google has a deep and vested interest in the outcome of because they make their money from people using their services.

To be clear on this. I am very much in favor of this sort of thing since getting rid of spam, come ons, very blatantly misleading information, and the like is a good thing. On the other I want to make sure they really are being impartial here since it would be entirely too easy to shape any sort of outlook by simple fact of picking and choosing what's at the top of your search results. Keep in mind I'd gotten a laptop from Google back in 2010, used their services for over a decade, and in general think they're awesome, and I'm still wanting to make sure someone's standing over their shoulder making sure everything's on the up and up.

All of that said there are other search engines. Personally I like DuckDuckGo since you can use it to search other engines and maintain a level of privacy so searches aren't tied directly to 'you'. Well more the fact you can just click a button, hit search again, and see what 'the other guys' searches are like.

Figured I'd share. Do with it as you will.