The Golden Days of Blogging

When I first started blogging in 2005, it was a lot of fun, and it seemed really easy to get traffic to my blog with very little effort. I miss the next blog button. It was a major source of daily traffic, and I actually discovered quite a few interesting blogs using that feature. Not sure when it disappeared but it likely coincided with the end of the golden age of blogging, sometime around 2012. 

Back during the golden age of blogging, which I would estimate probably fell between the years 2002 and 2012, free blogs from Blogger and WordPress were heavily represented in Google's top ten search results on any given subject. Now unless the blog is famous, or has thousands of incoming links, if you don't know its exact website address you'll likely never find it listed on Google anymore. 

Such is the case with this blog. Here's four screenshots taken on October 14, 2023 from four different search engines.

Google (5 results):

Bing (50+ results): 

Duck Duck Go (60+ results): 

Yandex (100+ results): 

Of course, it didn't help that I deleted over 500 posts. But at the very least, there should be at least 50 posts listed by Google, the company which owns Blogger, and it's strangely not there. It's like this blog has been partially delisted, or perhaps shadow banned.

But the thing is it's not just this blog. I'm noticing that I'm hardly seeing any blog search results coming up on Google anymore, unless of course you already know how to find them directly. 

I believe this is a form of censorship, to minimize the influence of citizen journalism, spreading alternative, politically incorrect and non-mainstream ideas. 

But it's not just blogs, it's everything. 

I remember back in the golden days of blogging how there used to be so many more websites to choose from. Like if you Googled a term, let's say "The history of the United States government's biological warfare experiments conducted on U.S. citizens without their knowledge or consent" without quotes. And maybe, just for the sake of example, back in 2005 it said there were 50,000+ results. That's just a made up number, but whatever the number was you could actually sit down and go through and view every single one of those results if you were so inclined. 

But now when you search for anything, no matter how many results it shows are available, it only let's you see a tiny handful of them. 

For instance, using that example search query, it says there's over 32 million results: 

And yet, it only let's you view 58 of them: 

And even if you click the option "repeat search with the omitted results included" it only shows maybe 100 more results, but with a bunch of duplicate content. And if you actually analyze the sources, it too is a very narrow selection. 

I mean if you look at politically contentious topics like "black lives matter" and "January 6 insurrection at the capitol" or "Donald Trump election fraud, stolen election". You see most of the very limited results all coming from the same sources, such as CNN, FOX, Wikipedia, Washington Post, New York Times, etc. I mean, that's just a small selection, but if you actually go through all the results, you'll find nothing from Blogger or WordPress, it's mostly all mainstream sources, with a huge amount of duplicate content. 

I don't remember it being like this ten years ago. It appears that Google is now the absolute worst, least accurate, least reliable search engine for finding information. Of course, a lot of stuff is hidden, and can be found by modifying your search query, but still a huge amount appears to be delisted, and I think that is being done intentionally for purposes of censorship. 

I very well may try to blog again at Wordpress and Substack, perhaps posting to all three sites, with the hope that at least one of them gets indexed, but Google is definitely not as good as it used to be, and I wouldn't be surprised if the real reason why is because it's been secretly taken over by a defective AI program, because all the real humans with real intelligence and real integrity got laid off and replaced by faulty intelligence suppressing, misinformation spreading, glitched out "Ministry of Truth" AI robots, who are accountable to no one, and are gradually running the whole company into the ground, and at the same time sending the best minds of Western civilization into the dark ages.