There was a lot of publicity about the Danish study that showed that masks are ineffective in preventing people contracting COVID-19. Some of this publicity was “good” and some was “bad.”
Confused? Don’t know what to think? Me either. Fortunately, we don’t have to do our own thinking. Google to the rescue!
All you have to do is to search study shows masks don’t work in Google, and you’ll get help:
Out of the 36 million results, only four make it to the first page (instead of the usual ten) before you get a list of common questions (the first one being, “Are masks effective in preventing COVID-19?”
Plus, of course, a paid ad by the WHO, whose mission now seems to have changed from promoting universal healthcare to promoting emergencies.
Interestingly, the second most relevant bit of information (after the ad of course) is an article telling us how to think about the study
Microsoft’s Bing turned up a totally different set of results. Somehow, with only 34 million sites to choose from, Bing returned information about the actual study.
Unfortunately, if you don’t know how to think about the study, you’re out of luck. Bing didn’t return that link in the first pages of results.
Then there’s duckduckgo:
Not so different from Bing.
And then Yandex, which only found 23 million results, but somehow managed to be a lot more on point that Google:
And then there’s my favorite, the heavily censored Chinese search engine Baidu, which ironically (or not) turned up its first result a story about the study being censored. “See, we don’t censor in China. It’s what the rest of the world does.”
Predictably, the other results refer to a totally different study and a denial that the study even exists.
Incidentally, Google’s mission, according to the company, is to
Organize information in the world and make it Easily accessible anywhere and useful.
Because it wouldn’t be useful if some information disagreed with the facts stated by the organization paying for that ad.
And if we had to do our own thinking!
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