[floomp]

> It's hard to use 'Orwellian' when the entity you're accusing is entirely dependent upon other sources and exercises no editorial control.

There's a lot of trust in Google with that statement. If this changes, how would you know? That's what's Orwellian about it.

It's not hard to imagine the results being silently tweaked by Google - not to say that they will do this, but it's a real danger, because it'd be very bad and hard to detect if they did do this at some point in the future, after we'd all gotten complacent and learned to implicitly trust the results.

[hahainternet]

That isn't Orwellian. If it was, it describes any resource which isn't instantaneously transparent. Lets say your clocks retrieve their time via radio signal broadcast. By your logic this is Orwellian because without checking external sources you wouldn't know if they changed the time!

Of course Google could use this for political gain or some other nefarious purpose, but they rely absolutely on user trust and so it would be an incredibly risky move.

Not to mention that looking at your watch or using bing or ddg or similar tools would show you the deception. It's just silly invoking Orwell over this I think.