4 ms·

> What's the blog? Since you're the second person who asked: iSteve. > Google is actually generally terrible in cases like this. Any popular pop culture thing

> What's the blog? Since you're the second person who asked: iSteve. > Google is actually generally terrible in cases like this. Any popular pop culture thing will totally drown out anything with the same name, even the original. Try searching for "fallout shelter" - the entire first page is about an old phone game. There are a couple non-game links on page 2, almost all are still about the video game for pages and pages. No, this is pretty obviously deliberate on their part. When I discovered this a few months back after searching "isteve," and surprised not to find it on the front page, and the results instead being dominated by some 2013 FunnyOrDie parody doc about Steve Jobs, I literally went through page, after page, after page of results, to see how far down it would be, yet none of the pages contained any links to the blog. If it had been on the second or third page, I wouldn't have been so suspicious. Meanwhile, Yandex, DDG, and even (I checked just now) Bing all have results for it on the first page when you search "isteve". Google's keyword suggestion feature is also telling: google "isteve", then add in a " b" or " u," and you get zero suggestions (presumably because people are searching "isteve blog" or "isteve unz").

tablespoon 4y ago
> No, this is pretty obviously deliberate on their part. I'm not so sure about that. Because 1) this phenomenon seems to be present on non-political topics, and 2) other, even more right-wing figures are still easily findable on Google (including links to their own websites). That raises the question, why this guy and not the others? Heck, it not even this guy, just this term, since the blog in question is the fourth result for "steve sailer" and even autocompletes. I think it's a very reasonable theory that the same phenomenon as I found with "fallout shelter," is at play here but the difference is your "iSteve" blog doesn't have the relative popularity to peek through even a little bit over the pop culture thing (v.s. fallout shelters, which is a topic with a significant popularity, even if it's far less popular than the video game). > Meanwhile, Yandex, DDG, and even (I checked just now) Bing all have results for it on the first page when you search "isteve". It's quite plausible the reason for that is because their algorithm is different, and not so biased towards popularity as Google's (perhaps because they don't rely so much on click-stream data to determine what people want to see). Google search has gotten really terrible in recent years, especially if you're looking for something a little off the beaten path in situations like this, and I think the exact reason is an over-reliance on click-stream/popularity data.

tablespoon 4y ago

> No, this is pretty obviously deliberate on their part. I'm not so sure about that. Because 1) this phenomenon seems to be present on non-political topics, and 2) other, even more right-wing figures are still easily findable on Google (including links to their own websites). That raises the question, why this guy and not the others? Heck, it not even this guy, just this term, since the blog in question is the fourth result for "steve sailer" and even autocompletes. I think it's a very reasonable theory that the same phenomenon as I found with "fallout shelter," is at play here but the difference is your "iSteve" blog doesn't have the relative popularity to peek through even a little bit over the pop culture thing (v.s. fallout shelters, which is a topic with a significant popularity, even if it's far less popular than the video game). > Meanwhile, Yandex, DDG, and even (I checked just now) Bing all have results for it on the first page when you search "isteve". It's quite plausible the reason for that is because their algorithm is different, and not so biased towards popularity as Google's (perhaps because they don't rely so much on click-stream data to determine what people want to see). Google search has gotten really terrible in recent years, especially if you're looking for something a little off the beaten path in situations like this, and I think the exact reason is an over-reliance on click-stream/popularity data.