Think about it in terms of cold, hard cash...

[freshwest]

16. Can't hardly do a thing now. When Scroogle was up and running for a decade or so, I could access

university research and history, government and corporate texts in the hundreds with the click of a mouse since the late nineties and this century. It wasn't a matter of asking to access, it was all public. There is no way to find the names of someone you don't know and ask.

In the Vietnam era without the internet, we also didn't ask as we searched for subject matter, that's not how we did it. We poured through college and public library and even newspaper records, etc. I will add we were not paid for any of that.

I have found nothing that compares with Scroogle in the internet era, as they kept it free of the advertised links that now take up the prescribed number of results to display. With the use of -com or other tactics, one could skip any commerical result wasting one's time trying to sell something.

Google kept changing the rules and kept saying the repeated requests for data from their proxy search through Google assets, was a bot or just spamming. It began to be shut off frequently as this tactic continued. One day without warning it was gone, and looking for the reason it was said to be personal. I didn't buy it.

A great deal was also lost from the work of the Bush internet team they called the 'scrubbers.' They were deleting any opposing views by a few techniques. Now there are the bots and paid people such as revealed in a video here on DU. It was a seminar (really a jobs seminar, no doubt) where they said that conservatives needed to get their message out by posting on anything - Amazon, whatever - to push down results of liberal views. They are shameless in their desire to suppress facts.

It's worked well, now searches are inundated with their spam until any other answers that might be on the net doesn't show up anymore.

I have seen also a strong push to make the results skew religious and in favor of GOP, Libertarian and the Bircher CTers. Then one runs out of options as it can take a very long time to find anything to support a liberal, progressive, Democratic view, no matter what search terms are used.

I was once able to find many sites and expand from there, now you must cite a website you know to get the result. This is a narrowing of information that really hurts us, as we don't get to go to more than a few places and those who are asking a question, will never see what we know, they will only get the pro-conservative sites.

I have found with very specific queries on official matters - who won what election, how to get information on voting, etc., that the page is full of what are actually conservative push sites designed to appear official. Or the results no longer answer the question at all, they post things that are years old and not current, even newspapers are refusing to offer content online, many of them.

When Groogle changed to highlight paid links for commerical interests, it was frustrating to go through them instead of getting useful results on Google. Scroogle had the option of a hundred results per page and many pages, all with meaningful information to use in making up one's mind and finding how things were being arranged. Now the information we want to prove our case won't even show up.

We're at a disadvantage now 'footnoting' our posts or threads due to our voices being literally shut down by big money - they have enough to pay for bots, for manual posting - and we can't get what we need. They know exactly what they are doing to control the flow of information and brag about it.

Back to the Vietnam era and getting proofs then. As Reagan came in, a big push to streamline and make 'modern' libraries and the amount of data one could find was reduced by simply selling off the reference manuals and herding people to what was trendy. In my city, a beautiful public library built by the WPA in the downtown area was shuttered and made off limits to the public in the 1980's, ostensibly to use for administrative purposes. A new one was built nearby, with uncomfortable seating, less ability to access data. It was like a modern art museum with little information.

The heyday of getting information online was in the early part of this century. Try as I might, current search engine choices are not working as well. I have 5 engines ones on my browser.

Strangely enough, Google Images is one of the best I have now as one can pick the image link, or the website link hosting an image. But it is falling under the conserative bots as very few liberal sites make it into the results.

Even a specific query, like 'ugly republicans' comes up with dozens of 'ugly democrats' instead of the GOP and then it runs out of space. Anyt query that doesn't go conservative still gets their results. Things that I know I've seen online, even Bible scripture that support liberal beliefs, are now shoved out.

That's the only solution I can get give you but since they are indeed being paid to drown our voices out to support the conservative meme, it's getting very hard. I have no alternative that does not go alternative or CT media and that ends up being Bircher when you go into it. Those are very plentiful.