(NaturalNews) Using Google as your primary online search engine could be subjecting you to brainwashing and propaganda, as the advertising and information giant actively filters search results to push its own agenda. A prominent psychologist has warned that Google's "filter bubble" censors certain information from view, promoting confirmation bias and ultimately ignorance of what's really going on in the world.

Michael Carr-Gregg says the effect of Google's proprietary web-crawling algorithms and tailored search results narrows people's understanding of the world, skewing public perception towards what Google thinks is important for them to know. He warns that real world events often fly under the radar in favor of junk-food news like celebrity gossip and reality television, for instance.

Australia's News.com.au reports that Google's filter bubble also tailors search results based on earlier search queries, preventing users from pulling up other pertinent information that might not fit into their normal routine of searching habits. Over time, such a system isolates users not only from content that deviates from what they normally encounter, but also from others who think and believe differently from themselves.

"There's this crazy idea that all the billions of web pages have been thoroughly vetted and reviewed, and this omniscient source found the best," stated Harvard University psychologist Dr. Robert Epstein to Pacific Standard Magazine, warning of Google's growing control over what we all pull up while searching online. "That whoever and whatever is doing the searching for us is infallible."

You can think of it like an echo chamber - the content you prefer is the content that Google will provide, mostly in the interest of custom-crafting its advertising to individual users. But the consequence of this is affirming what people already believe and creating an illusory reality that matches their own perceptions rather than what actually exists in the real world.

"There's a narrowing down of focus," adds Carr-Gregg, who works with children as part of his practice. "For most of my clients, Kim Kardashian is important, but the arms deal the U.S. signed with Iran is not really on their radar. By and large, the focus is on peers, school, parents and reality TV. Parents used to sit around the table and have conversations with their children, but now they are distracted by this stuff themselves."

Good Gopher search engine offers alternative to pro-censorship, anti-free-speech search engines like Google

It's all part of the societal dumbing-down process being promulgated through rapidly-evolving technological "progress," and unfortunately there's no end in sight. But there are alternatives to Google, at least, one of them being the all-new Good Gopher online search engine recently unveiled by Natural News.

The purpose of Good Gopher is to help overcome the overt bias and censorship of search engines like Google, which besides promoting a filter bubble also promotes disinformation sites like Snopes and Wikipedia that typically show up at the top of the list when searching for just about anything. Good Gopher is about freedom of thought, speech, and media - or as our own Mike Adams puts it, the "anti-Orwellian search engine."

You can check out Good Gopher by visiting GoodGopher.com:
http://www.goodgopher.com

Another option on the table is to unveil a "public" search engine in the same vein as information sources like NPR and PBS. This would presumably help overcome what Pacific Standard Magazine says is Google's "unchecked and hidden algorithm" that represents "unprecedented gatekeeping power for a private company."

Sources:

http://www.news.com.au

http://www.psmag.com

http://www.naturalnews.com

http://www.goodgopher.com