internet memory holes

this issue looks to extend beyond just google

gatopal™ kuppy made quite a startling find.

i mean wow, how crazy right? not even a mention of arch duke ferdinand!

in all seriousness, this led me to start down a rabbithole.

like many, my first instinct was to accuse google of memory holing certain conspicuous events only 2 weeks old.

“The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.”

anyone else getting worried that orwell was an optimist?

this seemed the obvious take and google has certainly done more than its share of such manipulation in the past, hiding and slanting “the internet” on a great many topics.

team “don’t be evil” is at it again seemed like the obvious conclusion to which to jump.

case closed.

but being a careful gato, i decided to dig a bit anyway.

and what i found was both interesting and potentially far more far reaching.

i started with google.

indeed, these results replicated. nary a mention of trump to be seen.

but here’s where the plot thickens:

duck duck go: same.

luxxle: same

brave: same.

this is not just google. it’s one big memory hole. i know some of the people who run these engines. some (like bendan eich) are longtime gatopals™.

they are not part of a shadowy cabal to erase the trump shooting.

i think this is something deeper and it’s at the media level, not the search engine level.

i think the most parsimonious explanation is not coordinated search engine meddling but rather the fact that there is nothing for which to search.

you simply do not see these words, “assassination” and “attempt” in the news stories to which things are linked.

you can find them in social media, but they are basically absent in media media.

they simply refused to call it that.

this was the issue i was discussing the other day:

even once this avalanche of absurdist headlines was replaced by ones that bore at least marginally more resemblance to reality, the words “assassination attempt on” appear basically nowhere.

i suspect this may have had more to do with a media-wide omerta than one from google.

it could also be a more general or deeper level sort of meddling/censorship around DNS or some other registry/routing level that would affect all search engines.

but then, literally in the time it took me to write this piece, things started to change. here’s luxxle now:

it may well be picking up the discussion of this issue that’s going wildly viral on twitter right now.

brave has not yet caught up, nor google (this is as of 2.01 PM EST 7/28/24).

will be very interesting to see how the rest of this plays out, but the issue looks to run deeper than google.

ADDENDUM: 2.30 EST, 7/28/24

i checked several SE’s including google.

the actual search results have lots and lots of “trump assassination” links.

so this issue seems to be really confined to the suggestions.

why would they diverge so intensely from the search results?

anyone on team toxo have a take on that?

ADDENDUM: 2.52 EST 7/28/24

yandex appears to have highly differentiated results

ADDENUDUM: 6 PM EST 7/28/24

it’s looking more an more like the divergence in suggestions in search box and search results is driven by a significant difference in methodology.

suggestions are driven by frequency of past queries as opposed to web links so they are not affected by what stories are out in the internet but rather just what text is being searched for.

brendan is the creater of brave (also mozilla and javascript) so his take here is well informed. (he’s also a friend and a serious opponent of censorship)

i suspect this is really the core of this issue and that it’s largely being blown out of proportion and misconstrued.