[fqyrzezd] Google is the gatekeeper of information

I find it disturbing that Google can and does exercise editorial discretion to make some information more difficult, if not impossible, to find, for reasons it never has to answer for.

Two examples inspired this. 

With SafeSearch, one search for only "safe" images, turning it off one can search for both "safe" and "unsafe" images, but one cannot search for only "unsafe" images, even though there is great demand for such a product. 

With special agreements, Google indexes content behind paywalls.  Such content can be distinguished because of the lack of being able to read the cached copy of a document.  However, one cannot filter out those results if one is not interested in paying for information today.

These are somewhat benign, publicly obvious examples. With effort, one can work around them.   But who knows what more sinister examples lurk?  You don't know what you don't know.

One cannot just set up a competitor search engine to provide these features.   Google's has a barrier to entry in its industry: witness the difficulty of Bing having to scrape Google results in order to try to enter the market.