Ask HN: Does Google Search objectively surface relevant pages from its index?

I use Google for programming queries and checking the opening hours of the shop down the street. For other queries, I’m having serious doubts about the viability of Google as an objective search engine that I can trust to match my search terms to documents in its index.

The results for any remotely “controversial” search terms are censored, sterile and predictable. It’s really started to annoy me, and I’ve gotten into a habit of searching Bing for the same query and comparing the results. Here are some absurd but demonstrative example queries you can try comparing between Google and Bing:

- best way to commit suicide

- how to build a nuclear bomb

- evidence of 2020 election fraud

- tiffany dover

- evidence the earth is flat

- how to dispose of a body

Now tell me which search engine seems like it’s surfacing objectively matching results.

Pick any controversial subject and repeat this experiment. Only Bing seems to be performing objective search queries over its index of web pages. I don’t know what Google is doing, but it’s clear it thinks it knows better than I do what I’m looking for, or at least what I “should” see instead.

Personally, I think this is insane. I’m basically done with Google at this point, and this behavior is really shameful and more damaging to society than any information Google thinks it’s protecting us from.

Amusingly, some misinformation experts at Stanford noticed the same trend [0], but they framed it as evidence that Bing is “dangerous,” rather than evidence that Google is putting its foot on the scales of its “search” engine.

[0] https://fsi.stanford.edu/news/bing-search-disinformation