Google search has been changed to give overwhelming precedence to search results that somehow have a special preference from Google. In one case, only 7% of the screen was used to display anything else. In another case, one had to scroll down four screens to find anything else.

I think that my occasional searches will be less vulnerable to this problem that most people are. I rarely search for a product or service in the first place. I search for other sorts of things that are less business-oriented.

It seems silly to use a search engine to search for "Italian restaurant" — that is not the way to find a good Italian restaurant. I would not make the decision to "eat in an Italian restaurant" in the absence of knowing about a specific good Italian restaurant that is feasible to eat in. If there isn't one, I'd rather eat in a good restaurant of some other kind.

However, this doesn't make the article's issue unimportant. A biased search engine is no substitute for an unbiased one.

The Obama regime has reimposed secrecy on the number of nuclear weapons the US has, after publishing the number once.

The NSA went to a college to recruit, and students gave it some hard questions.

The Observer published a story reporting that various European countries share personal data with the NSA, then removed it after concluding that the source was not dependable.

I had a political note pointing to that story, which I removed after the story disappeared. Until seeing this, I didn't know until now why it had been deleted.

If the report was based on documents posted by the NSA, I think that is sufficient basis to say that the NSA claims that other countries cooperate with it in the reported ways, and never the nondependable intermediate source.

US citizens: call on your senators to confirm Richard Cordray as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.