Google doesn’t want people to find alternative sources for news, healthcare, and politics. They now force all the mainstream sources to the top, regardless of whether the search terms entered have any relation to the actual results. And this seems to have carried over to other subjects as well, because I can never find obscure pages any more.
This should destroy Google, but for some reason it doesn’t, and it baffles me that they are still surviving in this.
This is has been my experience as well. When I search using very specific terms for a any topic tangentially related to something popular, all I get is the News articles.
I suspect it is because the best sources of information do not serve adds, but news, spam, and social media do.
Same could be said for any site that is smaller in scale than the #1 result.
If I'm looking for a review of a Yeah Yeah Yeahs album, I will see links to Amazon, Pitchfork, Rateyourmusic and other sites well before I find something written by a regular person on their personal blog.
Same goes for products. I will see a page of Amazon links before anything on say, a boutique Ecommerce website with a Shopify backend.
Thank the media for slandering the company, accusing it of perpetrating genocides, political strife, Russian election hacking conspiracy, etc... The reason they do this is being scared of liability, not a top-down desire to control.
This should destroy Google, but for some reason it doesn’t, and it baffles me that they are still surviving in this.