Does Google Interfere With Its Search Results? Check out this WSJ article

Google's search box has been designed to be minimalist but there's a lot going behind the scenes. The Wall St. Journal provided a compelling look at Google in an article entitled, "How Google Interferes with its Search Algorithms and Changes Your Results." 

It's worth checking out the article on your own but here are some interesting tidbits:

• There were about 3,200 algorithm changes in 2018 but just 500 in 2010.
• The auto-complete feature -- when you start typing a term, and Google offers predictive search terms -- is different depending on the browser you use: Google, Bing or DuckDuckGo. In some cases, the differences are minor but it suggests that user demographics are different, and Google anticipates that.
• The Journal says that Google "does blacklist to remove certain sites or prevent others from surfacing in certain types of results. These moves are separate from those that block sites as required by US or foreign laws...or to demote spam sites."
• "Google employees and executives, including co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, have disagreed on how much to intervene on search results and to what extent. Employees can push for revisions in specific search results, including on topics such as vaccinations and autism." 

Search is complicated and can be controversial. This article is worth reading in full to better understand Google.