I'm currently delisted by Google...

I have long been fascinated by the machinations of the Google search engine - who also own the platform on which this blog is published. 

At present, I mean a few minutes ago; this blog seems to be delisted by Google - so that searching my name in quotes for the past week gives no return - zilch. I don't exist.  

By contrast, Bing, DuckDuckGo and Yandex all have me top-ranked. 

Yet Google's own blog statistics award me 638,334 page views for the past week - absurdly high, I know; but these are Blogger's own data. 

I can't fathom what They are up to except that it is clearly purposive, not "random"; nor do I worry much about it or what (if anything) it presages. 

But it is microcosmic evidence of the kind of self-contradicting, and therefore self-destructive, phenomenon that is happening, increasingly - in the mainstream-dominant domain of public discourse. 

There is an epidemic of spinner-throwing into works, sand-putting into gears; all over the place and at all levels - and this is just a slice of my share of it!

NOTE: The reason I mention this; is that this sort of thing didn't happen on the internet 25 years ago, but now it happens All The Time. Back in the 90s and 2000s you could search the internet, day by day, year after year - and invariably re-find something you had found before - plus lots of new stuff. Searches would return thousands, or millions, of results. Now it is normal not to find something you could find yesterday, or earlier in the day. And you can never find much of anything. As WmJas pointed out even if you search something like "Jesus Christ" or "the Beatles", which has trillions of web sources, you'll only probably get a few hundred results. I used to be able to find web references to almost anybody - family, old friends; now most people's names yield no returns at all. The search engine strategy seems to be two-fold - to censor returns (or charge for what used to be cost-free) and severely to limit the volume of results - the first requiring the second of course, but the limitation in returns is far more extreme than censoring would require.