[benmcnelly]

You don't have to convince me that Google has intentionally led people to become more reliant on them, that is their business model, where user is the product and Google becoming as integral to your day to day life as possible is important; as their business model is literally "people use us the most and we know them better so advertise to them through us".

But I think we should have a clear divide between responsibility of the user and the content aggregates. Just like with editorial news and Journalism we of course can differentiate between the two, and there are ethics and integrity issues we should hold news outlets to, but we need to be careful of confusing a search engine with a news outlet just because people use it to find news and facts from various places. That does not make them arbitrators of the truth. The responsibility lies on the end user to use their judgment and wisdom and research to come to informed decisions. And the responsibility lies on the news agency to report factual things. Google just needs to help me find relevant information, and let me decide what is good ethical journalism and what is fictional drivel.

You might think "But doesn't that mean that anyone can scream as loudly as they want and people will hear them and might listen to them?" Well yes it does. And it seems like everyone here has a problem with that, because they think people have terrible common sense. People have been trying to sway public opinion through media since there was written word. But you should criticize the work of the book author, or maybe even the publisher who is constantly publishing crappy books, but not the book store or library who is just helping you find whatever you are looking for no matter who you are or what you like.

I don't think you people know what you are asking for when you want to put it in peoples heads that because someone or something is popular or used by many people it somehow has a responsibility to curate the truth.