I'm pretty sure we tried that way back in the day with <meta name="keywords" content="spam spam spam spam">. People would stuff that with every word in the engl

I'm pretty sure we tried that way back in the day with <meta name="keywords" content="spam spam spam spam">. People would stuff that with every word in the english language. Older search engines that used those keywords returned some pretty awful results. You simply can't trust sites, who have a strong incentive to get to the top of SEO rankings, to not lie. In fact, given at least one of your competitors will stuff their keywords to get to the top you'll have to do it too. It would become an arms race for who can stuff the most garbage into their indexes to "win". It just doesn't work. All search engines that attempt to be useful will have to filter out the junk. You just have to trust that the search engine you are using isn't withholding results from you that it considers "bad" (eg: "misinformation" (i.e. stuff somebody disagrees with)). And to me, that is the crux of the debate really. Nobody wants spam for search results--everybody agrees with that and there is no real debate about filtering that crap out. The argument really is should a very large company that has a huge market share get to decide what constitutes "fact" and what is "misinformation". Based on 2.5 years of experience so far, what was once deemed "misinformation" has a sneaky way of becoming "factual information". Labeling and hiding "misinformation" because it goes against some narrative pushed by incredibly powerful entities is very scary and there was a hell of a lot of exactly that going on during this covid crap. I used to fall on the side of "private companies can do whatever they want" but now I'm not so sure. Companies like FB, Twitter or Google play a huge role in shaping politics and society. I'm no longer convinced it is okay to let them play the role of "fact checker" or anything like that. Filtering spam is one thing, but hiding "misinformation" is entirely different.