Matt Taibbi about changes in Google's search engine

"You talk about Google's search engine. They had the thing called Project Owl that they implemented in 2017, where they change their way of measuring what stories come up first. they shifted to a model that emphasized what they call authority...

The analogy they gave was if you search for baseball previously you might have gotten your local little league, now you're gonna get http://MLB.com. So what ever we consider the more authoritative source and that's based on surveys of people what people think is authoritative. That's what's going to come up first.

So instead of if you search for let's just say Trotskyism. Instead of getting the world's leading Trotskyist website, which is the World Socialist Website, you will get it like a New York Times story about Trotskyism instead.

They want to push you towards the "authoritative" source. But that's subjective and again it's hierarchical and it's away from the spirit of how we would like to ingest information which is just let's see all of it and make our own decision."