Yep. Mass hysteria. And the internet makes it easier to spread, even though it's ideas rather than a biological virus.

The internet is the original superspreader.

and of course, I stumbled on an article:

Former GOOGLE CEO Calls Social Networks 'Amplifiers for Idiots'

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/former-google-ceo-calls-social-200127402.html

He is right.  I hope Google has more competition. It’s not right to silence people by altering search algorithms.  As he says they are not 100% and others are always competing.

Showtalk said:

As he says they are not 100% and others are always competing.

Duck Duck Go.

And a few others. Some of them get radically different search results than Google, and far less likely to cause trouble if you ever searched for certain disturbing combinations of things while fact checking or studying cold cases.

DuckDuckGo has similar search results to Google and can be set into most browsers as the default search engine. They don’t track but they are politically biased in the same manner as Google is. I was curious and did test searches on each site.  

That doesn't surprise me.

Startpage.com delivers completely different results, but it also often fails to find the obvious, like if one is trying to search for a specific error message to find a solution to a computer or network configuration or printer problem.

It’s all based on how the code is written. It’s relatively easy to write a basic search engine.  The difficulty is in the nuances.

Yeah. Someone said it was pretty effective, but I'm thinking it probably isn't worth the hassle because of the high volume of low quality hits on the first page.

Yes that is true.