> The second pushback is along the lines of “... Google is a damn good search engine ... ” ... I agree: Well, I disagree. 1. It is quite difficult to determin

> The second pushback is along the lines of “... Google is a damn good search engine ... ” ... I agree: Well, I disagree. 1. It is quite difficult to determine whether a search engine is good or not - without massive resources for surveying. Also, remember that even if one likes the results - they typically don't know which potential results they are _not_ seeing, to compare against. 2. Google is known to suppress search results on political grounds. Specifically, Socialist and anti-Imperialist news and commentary is partially suppressed. This was covered here on HN a few times already, e.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14975338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14975338 ; Google officials mostly keep quiet about this of course, so the breadth and scope are not entirely clear. There's also an NYT story about this and other issues, but it's paywalled: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/26/technology/google-search-bias-claims.html?_r=0 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/26/technology/google-search-... . I would not at all be surprised if other non-mainstream political views are being suppressed as well. 3. Inherent, over-arcing Biases in Google's ranking: This is a different issue than direct suppression or blocking. Here's I myself am being very anecdotal and speculative, but I have the distinct sense that larger websites get ranked higher by Google, so that for most of a typical person's searches they are likely to stay within a the sphere of, oh, I don't know, a few thousands or tens of thousands of larger sites. Again, anecdotally, when I search duckduckgo I seem to get into the "tail" in terms of site size faster. I may be totally wrong about this but as I said in (1.) we can't really know.