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So there’s a certain contentious topic out there that has recently become more prevalent due to the Israel-Gaza conflict. I’ve seen top YouTube comments edited to say “Google Dancing Israelis” on unrelated videos for some reason.

They are referring to https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/dancing-israelis

But strangely enough, when you search Dancing Israelis in Google, NOTHING, not even the KnowYourMeme article shows up. It just shows Jewish Folk Dances topics. I used other search engines like Yahoo and DuckDuckGo and they clearly show the KYM page and other news regarding it.

While I have no opinion on that, does anyone else have experiences on censorship on Google for any other topics?

Another censored search is notorious pirated video game repacker FitGirl. She’s completely unindexed by Google, leaving only fraud mirrored sites available. Again, using Yahoo and DuckDuckGo shows her real site.

Please excuse formatting, wording, etc. I’m on mobile.

I just checked it and it doesn't seem to be the case for me in fact our article about it was the first result

It's no secret that Google alters search results based on the following factors (and more):

• Region/nationality – including region within a country (especially Americans)
• Search history
• Language
• Personal data profile (i.e marital status, occupation, income)

We know that tech giants, social media companies, and internet infrastructure providers are all doing this in thanks to ya boi Snowden, and I highly recommend you spin up a VPN and swap between countries on a private, cookie-less browser to see the whole system at play.

There is plenty of documented study behind this, but unless you're in the few regions without information freedom (think Russia, China, Saudia Arabia, North Korea, Iran, Israel) the worst you'll usually see is certain items shifted around. What you're looking for is there, but Google would rather you see folk dance.

If you want to be entirely speculative, this is probably just one of those the system thinks you want X sort of deals. Google would take much more flak for feeding 9/11 conspiracy theories to people looking for folk dance than vice-versa.

Google is widely known for removing things they don't like, up to and including Scunthorpe-ing gun from Google Shopping (hope you didn't want to buy Japanese model kits.)

> Another censored search is notorious pirated video game repacker FitGirl. She’s completely unindexed by Google, leaving only fraud mirrored sites available.

This I don't blame them for, they basically have to unindex pirate sites as they become aware of them to not get in legal trouble.

Using search engines (outside of site specific/custom searches) for piracy is a terrible idea anyways – good pirate sites don't use SEO – they have an incentive to fly under the radar, not to become even more visible, and that goes double for scene groups which typically only post to private trackers.

Always use word of mouth and bookmark reliable sites.