Wow, flurry of activity. Hopefully David and Dan will contribute as well!
Anyway, I just tested those terms on Google and Duckduckgo (the latter is what I mostly use) via Tor. Interestingly, only a few of the terms Kevin posted worked for me. They came up with *exactly* the same results in two different sessions though, which is extremely unusual both for Tor. Also, Duckduckgo doesn't track users and therefore shouldn't be able to modify queries by user. It's giving the same results as Google, and theoretically for all instances of that search unlike Google, even though in other cases the results almost always differ from Google (and also the same for all instances of that search unlike Google).
Like Eric said, if you play around with the terms the results are often valid, like replacing "white men and women" with just "white men" or "white women". It seems "European history" + xyz always gives the same gallery of 100% images of 18th/19th c. black people. Why is the coincidence of poor results so specific and drastic?
Who knows. Maybe all the search engines got together and decided to leave some SJW-friendly algorithms out there to preempt any issue being made out of the search results for those terms being too race realist. Alternatively, alt rightists may have done it as a false flag.
To expand on my earlier point though - any company that benefits from a post-industrial environment would act like Google. There is no reason why Google should be valued higher than, say, Exxon. Not unless they've figured out a way to power self-driving EVs with data or something. 99% of their current value is unadulterated crap. It's like 3d printers. 99% of thingverse seems to be "you need a 3d printer to print parts for your 3d printer to keep working/ work better” or "you need a 3d printer to make models that you wouldn’t buy if they were 99c and free shipping on amazon prime".
Post-purchase self-justification in other words. I bought a creality so I can make a cable support bracket for the creality that didn't come with a cable support bracket, even though most of the parts are 3d printed. For people that haven't bought a creality, or don't use Facebook or Twitter, or use a different search engine than Google, 99% of their functionality is just noise. Any valid signal has long since been drowned out.
Lets look at youtube. I saw it in the early years, and sure enough fucking cat videos were amongst the first things uploaded, then Google bought it, then a handful of whack jobs made obscene amounts of money on it, then "because the advertisers rebelled" Google/youtube clamped down on the monetisation side.
I think this is what *really* happened:
1>> Google found out youtube was a money pit, and not even the kind of money pit you can write off for tax purposes as a loss leader and still be happy to run.
2>> Google found out that big business’s love affair with all things digital when it comes to advertising was heading for the divorce courts. P&G alone are cutting 500 million from their future digital advertising budget.
3>> People like me found out that no matter what we did to prevent crap vids from popping up, it doesn't matter. Google cannot detect the 947th time an identical video has been uploaded by some asshole, and can't detect that despite telling them 999 time by clicking "I don't want to see this crap".
Basically google can't recommend anything except the same old same old zero content clickbait. And that is 99% of the content. The
1% of decent content is drowned out to the point you'll never find it unless you know exactly what to look for. Enter Gamergate and alt right vs SJW wars and suddenly there's a flood of "meaningful content" whose creators "deserve" all the ad revenue in the eyes of their respective fanbases. Guess who also uses google to search for "cute xyz" or "Game of thrones spoilers" (apart from me of course)?
The overall point I'm trying to make is that companies like Google and Amazon have to create the illusion that they are a whole world unto themselves, and one that is good or perhaps even necessary to exist in. It's the only way they will continue to be used by billions of people despite availability of easily accessible and even better alternatives. Amazon for example is killing retail because they're selling cupcakes, cruise ships, sporting goods and grocery now. Here in India we have Flipkart, Naaptol and Snapchat, er, Snapdeal doing the same thing for consumers who got dial-ups in 2012 and switched to Chinese 4g smartphones in 2015.
Anyway, the dependence on a huge number of users must be hidden from the users themselves, since everyone has to think they are getting a unique experience (=something extra for doing nothing more than looking at pictures/text on a screen). Ideology makes that a little bit easier to simulate.